My conspiracy theory regarding SOAP is that major tool vendors support it because you need a complicated and expensive tool to design a SOAP service.
huh? Don't think so. Can you please give some more info about your opinion? My SOAP services was always easier to implement than others like XML-RPC for example. Never found anything complicated about SOAP.
Visual Studio web services generates some befuddling code, at least when I last used it about 5 years ago. Maybe things are better now?
Also, it is difficult to implement a good SOAP library. For example, in the Ruby world, there is soap4r, which has difficulties talking to EJB SOAP and .NET SOAP, which have different conventions. I had to interop with a .NET soap service, and it was pretty painful.
> My SOAP services was always easier to implement than others like XML-RPC for example. Never found anything complicated about SOAP.
Good for you. You must be smart.
I find REST much easier and straightforward. I never bothered learning the SOAP protocol, which doesn't make me very sad for some reason.