Short of the service provider giving you a library to access their code I prefer REST over SOAP for integration work I've done. REST in my experience forces be

Short of the service provider giving you a library to access their code I prefer REST over SOAP for integration work I've done. REST in my experience forces better documentation and interaction between the service provider and client. I've worked with way too many SOAP services where some dev from 8 years ago wrote the service and nobody at the company wants to go anywhere near it to modify it. On top of that there is nearly zero documentation or if it exists it's very poorly done. With REST I feel I'm forced to interact with the creator which in my experience also drives better documentation. Because who wants to answer all of my usage questions :-) I have never run into HATEOAS in the wild but it sounds pretty cool. I hope to get to try out a service that implements that one day.