And we went from SOAP to REST because REST with JSON was supposedly simpler. Then they realized that they needed some type of way to validate the JSON so they i

And we went from SOAP to REST because REST with JSON was supposedly simpler. Then they realized that they needed some type of way to validate the JSON so they introduced JSON schema. Then they realized that they needed some method to make a REST Api discoverable so they added the Swagger protocol (OpenAI). Now we are right back to being as complicated as SOAP. Except you can ignore the schema and swagger and have it just be simple, if that's all you need. The biggest problem with SOAP is that it is too easy for the service provider to just dump their internal data structures without any thought to how it should be serialized for people using the data. XML is Particularly nasty in this regard, because it doesn't map well to the data primitives of most dynamic languages. That said, I usually just treat SOAP APIs as if they were REST. By writing a class, and some wrapper methods for the parts I need. Instead of trying to consume the WSDL and use it the way they envisioned I would. Then again, if Python had better SOAP support I probably wouldn't even do that.