SOAP vs REST: The war between simplicity and standards

We've just gone through the SOAP vs REST debate at work while deciding to add a web API to our product, and SOAP won. It may not be pretty or as elegant on the wire as REST could be, but there is library support out there and things like WSDL to aid in adding a new client in a different language or framework.

 

 

With REST we're back in the game of protocol development (yes, XML is really just the transport for the custom application protocol), but SOAP gives us a fixed format in terms of message envelope, data types, constructs, etc. I'm confident in this decision, and I'm the one who developed the current proprietary protocol to avoid having to map into an existing protocol - mind you, SOAP was young back then.