Question

Following “A well earned retirement for the SOAP Search API” from Google announcing they have recently removed their SOAP APIs, I’m curious what the community thinks of SOAP in 2009. I can see its use for remoting and more verbose client-server stateless communication, but for more generalised [Ajax] web usage is it now redundent?

Have REST URLs removed the need for SOAP and that kind of web service once and for all?

Answer 1

SOAP is here to stay – and rightfully so.

In an enterprise environment, things like self-describing services (with the help of WSDL), ability to use transactions and reliable messaging are paramount. They’re much more important than the running after the “rave of the day”.

REST has its good uses – but it cannot ever replace SOAP totally, nor should it. REST is great for lightweight communcation – twittering and the like. But there’s also good reason to have and know about SOAP.

SOAP currently has the much better tooling support in most environments – it’ll be some time before REST has something comparable.

SOAP allows for machine-readable service description and service discovery – REST has nothing like that, your REST service might – or might not – be documented, and the quality of the English prose documenting your REST services varies wildly.

Yes, REST is all the rage right now – and it does make a lot of fun scenarios a lot easier to handle. But I don’t think it’s ready for “prime-time, enterprise-level” use, really. Maybe some day – but not today.