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  • About five years later, we should know that REST vs SOAP is winning in popularity (Google results) by a factor of 6x in favor of REST and considered by many a legacy (see stackoverflow.com/questions/38463/…). In addition, OpenAPI is filling the gap that existed originally about documentation of REST APIs (which was done through WSDL in the case of SOAP). Commented Dec 4, 2023 at 11:56
  • You would never implement SOAP for interactions between internal services. You would just create a service-oriented interface for that. SOAP is a protocol designed for web services specifically, it was an attempt to standardize the interface across administrative domains. It serves no useful purpose within an enterprise where its complexity does not justify the benefit it provides. Commented Aug 21 at 4:07
  • The decision of whether to use a resource-based or service-oriented design mainly depends on how complex the state management problem is. The downside of REST is it offloads state management complexity to the client, and it increases network traffic. If the problem domain is too complicated the client may not be able to manage it, in that case the server needs to step in and manage it. But that comes with its own downsides - greater CPU / memory usage on the server, often a more tightly coupled integration. Commented Aug 21 at 4:12