It's kind of hard to produce a calm response to this article but i will try my best. For one thing, SOAP (an envelope) cannot be compared to an architectural s

It's kind of hard to produce a calm response to this article but i will try my best. For one thing, SOAP (an envelope) cannot be compared to an architectural style. A better correspondence might be: Architectural Styles: REST vs. RPC Protocol Stacks: RESTful HTTP, ATOM etc. vs. WS-* Envelopes: HTTP headers(?) vs. SOAP For another thing, claiming that ws-* is standards based while REST is not is plainly false. Whereas ws-* includes 50+ not wholy compatible specs, REST is based on few but well corelated specs (XML, HTML, URI, HTTP). The number of spec-pages produced is completely irrelevant. In fact, like lines of code, may be counter-productive. A better measurement may be 'interoperability produced'. On this test, the benefits of REST shine in large distributed systems such as, say, the web.