REST vs SOAP

REST or Representational State Transfer has becoming more popular in the SOA world due to its simplicity compared to SOAP. Using SOAP it is definitely possible for different kinds of clients (java, .net etc) to call a SOAP service, but the style of the service does play a role in what the client can and cannot do. For instance .net client will have trouble calling a JAX-RPC style service. With document literal style all bean mappings in the WSDD should have name spaces which is not required in JAX-RPC. REST has made this very simple by dealing with XML or JSON instead of marshalled objects. The disadvantage being that the client will be getting back an XML or JSON.