SOAP - What's the point?

Posted by DanSingerman on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by DanSingerman
Published on 2009-03-26T16:50:42Z Indexed on 2011/01/11 16:54 UTC
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Filed under:

rest

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soap

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rant

I mean, really, what is the point of SOAP?

Web services have been around for a while, and for a while it seemed that the terms 'SOAP' and 'Web service' were largely interchangeable. However SOAP always seemed unwieldy and massively overcomplicated to me.

Then REST came along, and suddenly web services made sense.

As Joel Spolsky says, give a programmer a REST URL, and they can start playing with the service right away, figuring it out.

SOAP is obfuscated behind WSDLs and massively verbose XML, and despite being web based, you can't do anything as simple as access a SOAP service with a web browser.

So the essence of my question is:

Are there any good reasons to ever choose SOAP over REST?
Are you working with SOAP now? Would it be better if the interface was REST?
Am I wrong?

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