A few notes The "SOAP Guy" sounds rather like a straw man to me. I'd like to hear what a real soap guy has to say. Though I don't know if there is such a guy an

A few notes The "SOAP Guy" sounds rather like a straw man to me. I'd like to hear what a real soap guy has to say. Though I don't know if there is such a guy any more. Soap is just a transport format. Any WCF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Communication_Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Communication_Foundatio...) guys around? We use WFC between .Net programs, and once you connect to the right endpoint, it pretty much just works. You may have a look at the generated WSDL to see if it's sensible, but for the most part, it is "just plumbing. You don’t need to see it." We're not stupid enough to try to get WCF and SOAP to interop with other languages, though. We'd probably look at using ActiveMQ, or XML and URLs for that kind of job. Also the statement that "no one actually uses these other transports" is not true - we use TCP transport in some cases, and it's not that unusual. There are parts - large parts - of the spec (see the WS-* stuff, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_service_specifications#Messaging_Specification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_service_specificati...) which very few people use or care about, which would probably make full-blooded interop with other stacks very hard. It's sad that we didn't get there yet, but I'm glad that we've got what we do have. In some cases REST is better. Even MS knows this. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb931106.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb931106.aspx