REST and SOAP: It doesn't have to be a tradeoff

The excellent cover story report of InformationWeek magazine (article also on the Internet Evolution site) is about Rich Internet Applications (RIA's).

It mentions a team which "wrestled with the tradeoffs between REST- and SOAP-based services" before going with REST rather than SOAP:

"Railinc also dealt with technical decisions. Webb’s team wrestled with the tradeoffs between REST- and SOAP-based services, going with the former for greater simplicity. REST, short for Representational State Transfer, is an architectural style that doesn’t require header messages and other types of XML overhead. But it has no mechanism for establishing contracts between consumers and providers"

It doesn't have to be a tradeoff. With an XML Gateway, you can have both. You can present a SOAP interface to a REST service, or vice versa, doing the transformation on-the-fly at the XML Gateway. Through Service Virtualization, you can present a REST service in front of a SOAP service even if no "real" REST service exists (it's a "virtual service" exposed by the XML Gateway). This is one of the key features of an XML Gateway. Back on my older blog, here is an example of how REST and SOAP can co-exist, thanks to an XML Gateway.