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?*
*I hope so.
Oh if only SOAP were dead. I can assure you that some companies are still pursuing SOAP-based, RPC strategies as fast as they can.
As you already said -- REST can't deal with the verbose cases.
If you can tell me how I can take an arbitrary number of complex arguments through a RESTful web service, without hitting URL length restrictions, I'd love to hear it.
But for complex queries of scientific data, we need something more than positional parameters or key/value pairs.
My prediction is that SOAP won't die until sometime after COBOL and Fortran.
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.
Anyone interested might also want to see the Stack Overflow question "Is SOAP obsolete?".
There is nothing in REST that says you can't use form POST fields to PUT data for when you need to send complex requests over. You can even post big blocks of bulky XML if you want to try and make it as SOAPy as possible.
IMHO SOAP gives you nothing but a wrapper that you never needed to begin with. The thing that killed it for me was the way Axis and other engines compile stubs of your WSDL into their code and then every time you add something to the WSDL it breaks the consumers, even if everything was designed to be backward compatible. REST forever.