Web services have become common place in today’s connected world. Companies like Google, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter expose Web services to allow other developers to build on top of their infrastructure. In the consumer world these Web service APIs have allowed for a variety of fascinating “mash-ups” of data. In the business world, Web services have allowed for greater intra-company and inter-company (Business to Business or B2B) communication. What used to be done through TCP, FTP, and custom file formats can now be done with HTTP and XML.

In the early days of the Internet, a group backed by Microsoft started work on a standard called SOAP, a foundational layer for Web services. In the early days when people talked about building or consuming web services they were inherently talking about SOAP-based web services. Through the years SOAP has continued to evolve. The WS-* family of specifications provides greater support for reliable messaging, transaction control, and security. However, the increased functionality comes with a cost. A common criticism of SOAP is the complexity and overhead that come with it. Supporters have tried to counter these criticisms through better tooling and frameworks to abstract away the underlying complexity.

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