The REST API Design Handbook

by George Reese

I tend to prefer SOAP in a very few narrow use cases that fit the following criteria: • I have known language homogeneity and that language has solid SOAP support • My audience is limited (in other words, not some generic, publicly consumable service) • Delivery time is absolutely critical With SOAP, you don’t have to spend too much time modeling your services. If you are writing in a single language, you can just define an interface, implement it, and move on. It hardly looks like a distributed system at all. SOAP starts to fall apart, however, when multiple languages come into play or cost of maintenance becomes a factor. While SOAP is meant to be language agnostic, the reality is that many commonly used languages do not have very well evolved tools for building SOAP-based applications. Furthermore, as time goes on, the lack of control over your SOAP infrastructure (and the lack of planning often associated with SOAP services) can slowly increase your technical debt.