> when implemented properly you forget it's there because it just works. I think that's the link missing for most developers. SOAP was intended to allow machin

> when implemented properly you forget it's there because it just works. I think that's the link missing for most developers. SOAP was intended to allow machine-generated SDKs to remove all of the sharp edges of dealing with it, and in that regard it was largely successful. What brought it down was the advent of non-"enterprise" web development—development happening outside of a .Net or Java IDE that generated code for you. If you ever had to handroll a wrapper for a SOAP endpoint though, god help you. I honestly believe SOAP was the thing that made XML seem uncool by comparison to JSON and REST. JSON still doesn't solve data representation problems as well as XML, we've just learned to accept "good enough" in its stead.