SOAP - What's the point?

Question

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

Answer 1

The way I see it, SOAP might be more "flexible", but as a result it's just way too complicated (you mentioned the WSDL, which is always a stumbling block to me personally).

I get REST. It's simple. The only downside I might see is that you are limiting yourself to those 4 basic actions against a single resource, which might not exactly fit the way you view your data.