[WorldWideWayne]

> What the author ends up proposing, as usual, is basically RPC-over-JSON [because] "message content/transmission channel."...

No he's not. The RPC pattern is a tad more specific than "any pattern that separates message content from channel". Likewise, just because you put one or more "verbs" in your payload doesn't mean you're doing RPC.

An RPC system has a much more rigid message structure that represents a function call, which is automatically marshaled via concrete client and server methods. If you're just receiving a payload and calling one or more methods based on it's contents, you're not doing RPC and you're not even touching upon any of the problems of SOAP.

The actual problems with SOAP have very little to do with the fact that messages can be serialized or that there are verbs. Here are some of the problems with SOAP:

    - XML is verbose, making transmission slower.
    - SOAP is a huge, complicated type system compared to JSON.
    - Mapping SOAP to a given language is difficult.
    - Security concerns over automatic function marshaling.

Meanwhile, you can write a JSON parser in an afternoon and it's extremely simple idioms are relatively easy to relate to a given programming language.