SOAP is boring, we need more REST

Since SOA became a buzz word, web service has been touted by vendors as the holy grail for EAI or even more, restructure of the existing IT architecture to get a SOA brand. However, if SOA is not driven by real business needs, it must be doomed. So if we have have done extensive cost benefits alaysis of SOA and concluded that we will have one, how can we do that? Basically SOA is a top down approach, because implementation of SOA need a holistic view of the entire IT infrastructure. Maybe there are incremental ways for SOA that I don't know. As a top down approach, it is more about governance rather than devise of a cutting-ege fancy technology to implement it. However, technological aspect somehow determines the adoption rate of SOA.

For now web service is the mainstream implementing technology for SOA because big vendors are driving behind it. But recently there is a new buzz word REST. REST has been a hot topic in many technology conference, like http://enterprisewebconf.com/sessions.html, the state of REST vs. SOAP, intro of REST, qcon presentation about combining REST & WS-*. The most interesting one I have watched is by Steve Vinoski, who was been in trenches for decades. When a CORBA guy is talking about distributed system, we shoule be listening. So what is this guy really talking about? Well, RPC is fundermantally flawed, REST is a better alternative way to go. That's what he is advocating. However, some guys don't buy it. Hot debates happened here, here and etc. One of points I think make sense is that it depends on what kind of control you have on the system to be built. If you have total control of all of the end points of the system, RPC can be used for optimized performance; on the other hand, if some of the end points are outside of your control, REST is a better alternative. So, in this reasoning, SOAP just doesn't fit into the space. Here is an extensive comparision between WS-* and REST.

UPDATE: I just run into this post about what Gartner coined as WOA(Web Oriented Architecture). Actually WOA is just an attempt of Gartner to make a new brand of its own from REST. Nothing new. On the other hand, Gartner proposed WOA as constraints of WS-* stack. How this can be done in the real world? I suspect vendors have motives to do it.