Last I encountered a SOAP based service was during my internship in a financial firm in 2013. That was the time when I started my career in IT. I remember having some study material about SOAP in one of my engineering course. Outside of that, I haven't used SOAP much during my career.<p>I am asking this since the question of "Difference between SOAP and REST" came in one of my recent interviews. From what I know (and what I found on Google) SOAP is a protocol with tight coupling between client and server for information interchange which is closely related to business logic. Whereas REST is more flexible stateless architecture for data transfer.<p>Can someone please correct me if I am wrong about this difference between SOAP and REST? Also, what is the present-day significance of SOAP?
SOAP became very slippery and got washed down the drain.<p>Seriously, SOAP is based on a number of rather heavy-weight standards: WS-*. In recent times, I have only seen it used in the context of Java based systems running on enterprise frameworks. Given the choice, I much rather use REST with JSON (instead of XML and its baggage).