@hasenj REST is an architecture based on HTTP1.1 which was released in 1999. It's not new, it's just gaining momentum as people become aware of what's available to them.

never trust the stats you did not falsify yourself. Replace the "API" with "web service" and the stats look differently. http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=soap%20%20%22web%20service%22%2Crest%20%20%20%22web%20service%22&cmpt=q and all the traffic is from India. So what doues this tell us?

I don't know anything about soap or rest, but those who insist SOAP retains its validity in the enterprise are ignoring the fact that SOAP has declined as seen in the trend charts. This shows a wittling down of SOAP in the enterprise which means it is not viable in the long term.

The only thing abundantly clear from these statistics is that more people want to call their APIs REST based than SOAP based. From my experience with APIs listed in the Programmable Web, having the REST tag guarantees absolutely nothing.

How many of those self-proclaimed REST APIs are indeed truly so? I would argue that the vast majority is just tunneling RPC over HTTP without any support for hypermedia and very little support for content negotiation and the idempotent methods of the uniform interface.

As some of the commentators have mentioned before, majority of SOAP is within the enterprise, behind the firewall. This is because the tools used for coding/development automatically generate SOAP services/interface definitions/clients etc.

I'd like to balance the enterprise comments with my experience; REST is a serious approach in SAP enterprise software landscapes, and could have taken the prize in being the most-mentioned integration approach mentioned during the TechEd technical conference this week in Berlin for the world's largest Enterprise software vendor SAP. For example: http://twitter.com/qmacro/statuses/27161703094 Sure, REST won't be used by people just following what their tools dictate, but for people serious about enterprise integration in the long term, which definitely includes the vendors, partners and developers of SAP software, REST is very much alive and growing. dj

First, this story is not about REST (the arch style), but about HTTP (the protocol). Yes, "Straight HTTP" is now taking up the bulk of new API implementations. No, SOAP is not going away, but holding it's own. Finally, as the stats show, SOAP was always trailing HTTP implementations, now the gap is wider.

Interesting. This compares the APIs listed in the ProgrammableWeb, May 2010. Right now it lists 373 APIs using SOAP, out of 2220, roughly 17% REST has 1642, around 74% That is totally making sense, as REST is a style for the web, and SOAP is an RPC in disguise way of doing web services (not all, but the majority), and the majority of those may not be listed in that site. Anyhow, I wanted to make two little points clear here: 1. REST is not simple. Many of the so called REST apis are not RESTful, actually. It has momentum and many people see it as a better way to work on web. 2. That is why the searches are more on the REST side now, because of people trying to learn and understand about it. That means we have much more interest, not necessarily more usage or broader acceptance. So, this article points to a good suggestion: try to learn REST, the true way, as this is something that should be under consideration on new and current jobs. Still, that doesn't mean that SOAP is dead, the charts above need to be read carefully.

@Strumpman JSON & JSONP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON

Is javascript there for JSON-RPC ? If so, I think its cool that it ever reached 7%, and unfortunate that it's down a point. It can replace SOAP & XML-RPC while living happily alongside REST

I have to echo some of the previous statements. REST is great for publicly consumable services, but for enterprise it's still SOAP, and for many good reasons. And I'm willing to bet there are an order of magnitude more internal enterprise web-services than there are public facing ones. So if you had the REAL numbers I'm guessing SOAP is actually absolutely crushing REST.

They do somewhat different things. REST is definitely easier to work with, faster to implement, and makes moving data around much easier when you're talking about web applications and you own both sites or have a well published interface. SOAP on the other hand, does some things REST doesn't. Create a good Web Service based on SOAP and get the wsdl right (or let your web application server build it), then just point Visual Studio to the WSDL and you nearly instantly have a very good way of talking between a desktop application and a back end server. The same holds true for several other programming environments. I use both. I'd expect there to be more REST based stuff because there's more need for communication within web applications between the client side javascript and the back end data. That doesn't mean SOAP isn't powerful. There are far more cars made then tractor trailers -- but you can't really have an economy without big trucks.

SOAP is not intended for hackers or cool web 2.0 startups It's for hairy enterprise applications and pointy haired bosses who consume the typical marketing bullshit as measurement of industry standards and best practices.

Exactly what does "JavaScript" mean?

One big major place where SOAP is still used is enterprise. By default if you create a Web Service Project in Visual Studio, it uses SOAP internally. I am not sure but for using REST you need to use WCF which is again something devs would find difficult if you never used legacy web service development model in .NET. So people working in corporate sectors use only which is provided by .NET/Visual Studio. I bet many would not have even heard the name "REST". Proof - my experience. My last application was SOAP since that was the ".NET way" at that time

Agree with Carson, internal SLAs are completely different and drive the use of data contracts. SOAP isn't going anywhere, and REST isn't a viable replacement for it on the enterprise.

The title is a little misleading given that SOAP is still very much alive. It is certainly true that for publicly accessible APIs its use has declined but when it comes to private APIs SOAP is still the primary choice.

Completely agree with Joseph that SOAP cannot die off fast enough. Unfortunately, 15% is still a pretty big chunk of the pie. Maybe adding ", please" to the end of the title of this post might help.

SOAP can not die off fast enough.

So when will you update your API to use REST?