> Too often I try to access Java or PHP web services from .Net, where the tooling is very strict, and it just falls apart. Or I'll have to use something via JS that is just excessively painful to use in practice for no good reason.

On the other hand trying to use anything from .NET land that implements WS-Security from PHP or Java is also exceedingly painful. I recently had to integrate very similar APIs from 5 different companies into an internal application...

One used an HTTP(s) REST API written in PHP, it used mod_auth and I was done in 30 minutes.

One used SOAP with some custom extensions, I hacked around a bit with the PHP SOAP classes and was done in a few hours.

One used WS-Security, and after a few days of hacking around I ended up using Netbeans' tooling to generate a Java client that could consume the service and forward the results to PHP.

Another used a (more recent) version of WS-Security and the same trick wouldn't work, so I contacted their support who admirably tried to create a java client to consume the service, gave up, and created a regular SOAP bridge for us to use.

One company is still trying to get our AD credentials set up with their vendor software that uses Biztalk somehow (they've been scarce on the details) after two months of waiting.

RESTful services in PHP and Java may not have a pretty GUI configuration tool, but they are much simpler to get working than SOAP and any of the MS extensions in my experience.