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

I find that SOAP fits in most appropriately when there is a high probability that a service will be consumed by corporate off the shelf (COTS) software. Because of the well specified contract employed by SOAP/WSDL most COTS packages have built in functionality for consuming such services. This can make it easy for BPM/workflow tools etc. to simply consume defined services without customization. Beyond that service use case REST tends to be my goto web service implementation for applications.