While surfing The Server Side yesterday, I stumbled on some blog entries written by Carlos Peres about SOAP and REST. His view is that SOAP is on life support, just barely alive because of the dollars pumped into marketing various tools by IBM, Microsoft, and others. As evidence, he cites the shift of publicly accessible web services APIs at BlogLines, Flickr, Mappr, Del.icio.us, 43Things, and Yahoo toward a REST application style and not SOAP.

Looking at the evidence, I have to agree with him, at least for those publicly accessible, consumer APIs. My sense is that SOAP will still have a big play in the enterprise, not because it's the right thing to do, but because it's the politically correct thing to do and most enterprises select technologies that way. The fact that the publicly accessible APIs are moving toward REST is interesting, however. It suggests that the "official" webstandards APIs are simply too complex and come with too much baggage to be useful.