Document or RPC based web services

Question

My gut feel is that document based web services are preferred in practice - is this other peoples experience? Are they easier to support? (I noted that SharePoint uses Any f

Answer 1

As mentioned it is better to choose the Document Literal over RPC encoded whenever possible. It is true that the old java libraries (Axis1, Glue and other prehistoric stuff) support only RPC encoded, however in today's most modern Java SOAP libs just does not support it (e.x. AXIS2, XFire, CXF). Therefore try to expose RPC encoded service only if you know that you need to deal with a consumer that can not do better. But then again maybe just XML RPC could help for these legacy implementations.