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 think SOAP appeals to the Java and .net crowd who may be more familiar with the old CORBA and COM and less familiar with internet technologies.

REST also has one major drawback: there is very little guidance on how to actually implement such a system. You will find significant variations on how many of the public RESTful APIs have been designed. In fact many violate key aspects of REST (such as using GET for manipulation or POST for retrieval) and there are disagreements over fundamental usage (POST/GET vs POST/GET/PUT/DELETE).