[AtlasBarfed]

Simple Object Access Protocol...

Simple: by the end I was dealing with self-signed bodies and validation, version hell, framework hell, and namespace super-hell.

Object: um, not really. It was request/response. Nothing really "OOP" about it at all.

Access: didn't really help much with access, that was all HTTP

Protocol: There were so many protocols and frameworks attached to those protocols and versions of the protocols that ... in the end of the day, it had no protocol.

[User23]

The best thing about SOAP is that it drove industry-wide REST adoption. That had its own problems, but at least they were largely due to a failure of implementers to understand what using HTTP as an application rather than a transport protocol meant. And now we have GraphQL, which while it has its own faults[1] is far less unnecessarily complicated than SOAP and provides considerably more value.

[1] Oh crap I’d forgotten about SOAP faults until I wrote that word. Please help me I’m having traumatic flashbacks.