Why Is HTTP/SOAP considered to be “thick”

Question

I\'ve heard some opinions that the SOAP/HTTP web service call stack is \"thick\" or \"heavyweight,\" but I can\'t really pinpoint why. Would it be considered thick because

Answer 1

I think it's mainly that the SOAP envelope adds a large amount of overhead to constructing the message, especially for the common case of a simple request with only a few, not-deeply-structured parameters. Compare that to a REST style web service where the parameters are simply included in the URL query.

Then add to that the complexity of WSDL and the typical "enterprise" library implementations...