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Considering that more and more Web Services are implementing a RESTful interface, I am wondering what the future of SOAP will be?

I'm looking for any kind of papers, statistics, articles or publications from official sources (e.g. books, articles and journals) which provide information on the future of SOAP.

Thanks in advance!

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I edited the tone of the question, to prevent the question from being closed. – Pindatjuh Aug 1 '11 at 10:39
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"the future of SOAP". Predictions of the future are very, very expensive. I prefer PayPal as a way to fund my predictions of the future. The more you pay, the more accurate I can be. – S.Lott Aug 1 '11 at 14:13
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They aren't really competing technologies. If you need the features of SOAP and the WS-* implementations then you should use those. If you don't, you should use REST. See this Q for more:programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/23386/… – Jeremy Aug 1 '11 at 15:29

migrated from stackoverflow.com Aug 1 '11 at 11:11

4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

It is a protocol that is in the wild with a wide variety of supporting services, devices and toolkits. At the very least lots of already built things are going to continue to support SOAP until it becomes painful not to. Which could be well beyond our lifetimes.

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up vote 3 down vote

Once a RESTful service can provide all of the features available in SOAP, or once those features are no longer necessary, then SOAP will slowly cease to be used.

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REST can provide all the features of SOAP already – Tom Squires Aug 1 '11 at 15:36
Utter nonsense. Start with the fact that REST is not a protocol, just an architectural style. – John Saunders Aug 1 '11 at 15:37
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Anything which requires the use of a protocol. – John Saunders Aug 1 '11 at 15:42
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So the HTTP that supports REST is what? Not a protocol? – S.Lott Aug 1 '11 at 21:58
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I don't think it follows that because X can provide all the features of Y, or features of X are no longer required, that Y will become dominant and X obsolete. There are lots of "obsolete" protocols and languages that are still in use today with no sign of ever going away. C is still used even after C++ (and C++ still around despite Java and C#) and POP is still around after IMAP etc. – Dan Diplo Aug 2 '11 at 7:50
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up vote 3 down vote

Considering there are plenty of companys still working with asp classic (the last company i worked for) soap will definatly still be about for a very long time. It may be depreciated a lot quicker than that though.

Personaly I find soap to be a very complicated solution to quite a simple problem. REST is so much more elegent and flexible

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up vote 1 down vote

You're going to have to deal with both SOAP and JSON for a long long time. As @WyattBarnett said, "... well beyond our lifetimes." (We hope!)

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