perception of SOAP and REST by working programmers

[Kragen Sitaker]

M and C used to work together on <in-house application>, but now C has
gone off to join a startup.

<M> C - Interesting fact: Now that we have more and more people using
    our web services on the <in-house application>, they all see to
    prefer REST to SOAP.
<C> not surprised
<M> In fact, the only things still using SOAP are the main <in-house
    application> and the <subgroup X> <in-house application> and they
    only use it b/c we haven't gotten around to changing it.
<C> REST is more flexible, granular, freeing etc
<M> yes
<C> the only reason i did SOAP was because K thought it would get more support from the bigwigs
<C> and there wasn't really enough info on what we might want to do to
    come up with a good REST grammar
<C> (and i was too ignorant at the time)
<M> You know, I thought SOAP would get more attention too.  But
    everyone who is interested: <group A>, <group B>, and another
    faction of <group X>, are all asking questions only about REST.
<M> Which is surprising, b/c some of those are Java shops so I figured
    they'd be all about SOAP.
<C> SOAP has had a lot of bad press lately
<Kragen> heh
<C> the whole WS-* standards extravaganza put people off
<Kragen> extandarganza
<C> yeah
<Kragen> you can use SOAP in a RESTful way
<M> C - We go live on the 15th BTW (that's <feature X> rollout).
    Nothing has happened in the last month, since we set that date, to
    postpone it.  So it looks like it might happen.
<C> remarkable
<C> that's cool
<Kragen> the interesting part of SOAP is its serialization of data
    structures
<M> Yeah SOAP and REST are not at odds.  Although, when most people
    say SOAP it seems they mean using it in a very specific way.
<M> and that very specific way seems to be at odds with REST.