LAS VEGAS – So, which style of service enablement is better: SOAP or REST?

A pair of programming experts tried to put that debate to rest March 27 during a talk at The ServerSide Symposium here. Ted Neward, founder of Neward & Associates consulting and training company, and Brian Sletten, a partner with Zepheira, a Web 2.0 enablement and software development shop, argued the benefits and drawbacks of both Simple Object Access Protocol and Representational State Transfer.

Sletten and Neward discussed the benefits of Web services and how the vision behind them is solid in the goal to deliver reusable business functionality, platform and language independence, asynchronous processes, coordinated business systems, long-running transactions, and multipartner orchestrations and integration.

However, "reality bites," Sletten said. Instead of the nirvana expected under the vision for Web services, many users have been met with mass confusion, artificial complexity, competing visions, unmet interoperability promises, expensive failures and modest successes, he said.

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