Should Shoechicken be soapy or restful?
Even though Shoechicken is a Rails application, currently it has no plans for any user interface. It will only expose web services for external clients to consume. In the web services world, you have two camps: SOAP or Representational State Transfer. With that said, we had to make a decision as to which style of web services we will provide: SOAP, REST or both.
One big advantage of using SOAP is the code generation tools that are available in various languages. It works extremely well when you control both sides. However, it can get a little more hairy when you do not have the luxury of a homogenous environment.
On the other hand, REST is very simple. It just uses the old, trusty standard HTTP to transport requests without wrapping it. All the client need to consume a service is a way to send HTTP requests and parse XML.
We want to keep Shoechicken as simple as possible. I feel REST style of web services will be easier to implement and easier for clients to consume with fewer interoperability issues.
During the day I work on a distributed financial system that provides SOAP style web services. It would be fun to learn what is on the other side of the fence. That is one of the main reasons I went with REST for Shoechicken.
