Diego Berrueta

(This is a reprint of the original post)

I'm still shocked that Google has deprecated its SOAP webservice to search. This webservice was, no doubt, one of the most popular ones.

Nowadays, there is a battle between the SOAP/WSDL-based webservices and the "lightweight" webservices (a.k.a. REST). I'm not an expert, but in my opinion, there is a lot of hype around REST. I believe that SOAP/WSDL webservices are a powerful and useful solution in many cases. Obviously, they are more complex than REST, but I'm not afraid about that, and I'm willing to pay the price to obtain some benefits. The first releases of SOAP and WSDL were not particularly good, but fortunately, they have improved since then. Experience tells us that there is no silver bullet for middleware (just remember: CORBA, RPC, IDL...).