It’s clearly SOAP-beating day. Here’s Nelson Minar’s view:

The deeper problem with SOAP is strong typing. WSDL accomplishes its magic via XML Schema and strongly typed messages. But strong typing is a bad choice for loosely coupled distributed systems. The moment you need to change anything, the type signature changes and all the clients that were built to your earlier protocol spec break. And I don’t just mean major semantic changes break things, but cosmetic things like accepting a 64 bit int where you use used to only accept 32 bit ints, or making a parameter optional. SOAP, in practice, is incredibly brittle. If you’re building a web service for the world to use, you need to make it flexible and loose and a bit sloppy. Strong typing is the wrong choice.

via Tim Bray