Is SOAP Bad?

No, I think that question is bad. When people ask me this question, I ask them back. Is C bad? Is COM bad? People who have grown in the times when Netscape was the most popular browser or Turbo C++ was the favorite compiler will clearly say - No.

C and COM were the best and our favorite back in the day. In some cases they still are. Operating Systems were based on pure C and COM and so are they today. But people have grown to use languages like C++,C#, Java and in general Object Oriented Programming (OOPs) with time. Because, they are better. They resemble the problems at hand better. They make code look better. They represent how we see the real world

SOAP is like C. It is procedural. When C was created, everyone used it to the limits and someone out there realized they needed something object oriented. They wanted to have classes, fields and operations on them. Similarly, someone realized that APIs had to modeled in terms of resources, end-points and operations. And REST was discovered.

Does that make SOAP bad? No. Is SOAP here to stay? Probably. Do 'I' think REST is better? Yes!