Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously? I'm actually surprised that anyone would find SOAP complex. I see it as incredibly simplistic to implement. Are you really saying you avoid web services because you don't understand SOAP? I've done them in both .NET and Java many times.
It's almost as if the vendors of such awesome technology as the .Net stack and the wonderful world of Java app servers was trying to get you to buy some brain-dead tools to manage what should be as simple http get/post The only useful thing SOAP has done for the entire development community is to give lead developers or tech managers making hiring decisions a huge red-flag. As soon as anyone mentions SOAP with enthus…
The alternatives were either that or a custom pipe-separated format.
I'll take serialized objects over XML all day.
Prior to this discussion, I wasn't aware of JSON on REST, I guess I should catch up a bit- I live in an awful legacy-app development world, which we need to expose on a crumbling tower of VB6 and .NET apps that interact with it externally - VB6 is the "new" part btw, the old part is an old SUN technology called FORTE 4GL UDS.