The whole story was published on InfoQ on 2008-8-16：http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/08/rest-vs-soap-stack
The debate over REST vs. SOAP is really an age-old one. However it fired up again over a recent remark by Tim Bray, the XML guru in Sun technologies. Tim said in an interview at OSCON that,
The SOAP stack is generally regarded as an embarrassing failure these days ... REST does what [the SOAP stack] was trying to do in a much more viable, elegant, cheap, affordable way except that we've got no tooling around it yet.
As before, proponents on both sides spoke up to support their favorite styles. The debate has formed a long thread with over 150 replies on the Service-Oriented-Architecture Yahoo! Group, where Nick Gall gives one example of a large enterprise that moved away from SOAP:
Wal-Mart replaced its supply chain's VAN EDI infrastructure several years ago with EDIINT AS2 and is still happily using it to this day. AS2 is basically POX, with its own approach to idempotence for reliable message delivery.
Mark Baker adds:
I've been predicting SOAP would never see widespread use outside the firewall.
And when talking about what can be considered a successful example of using SOAP, Nick points out:
What I am really seeking are large enterprises that are truly leveraging the power of SOAP in ways that provide convincing evidence that SOAP "works for the job" in ways that other approaches would struggle. IME very few enterprises really need SOAP for what they are doing -- it was put either put in by consultants as a checklist item, or the tool used SOAP by default. The majority of SOAP use appears to be simply driven by inertia, not any belief in its superiority in doing the job.
See InfoQ for the whole story.
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