Benjamin Eberlei has a new post today looking at the future of SOAP in PHP for the upcoming year. In his opinion, despite negative comments and harassment the technology gets, it still has the advantage over REST.

These last years REST has gotten all the buzz, everybody seems to be using it and there are lots of talks about REST on conferences. SOAP used to be big for building APIs, but everybody seems to hate it for various reasons. I have used SOAP in several projects over the last 10 years and this blog post is a random collection of information about the state of SOAP in PHP 2014, as a reminder to myself and to others as well. Why care about SOAP in 2014? For server to server (RPC) communication it still has massive time to market and stability benefits over REST.

He points out some things REST lacks like a standard to describe endpoints and a way to automatically generate clients in any language. He then gets into some of the basics of SOAP and PHP's included functionality. He shows some of the configuration options you can use for things like debug output, exceptions and custom exception handlers. He recommends the Zend Frameworks SOAP Autodiscovery for generating WSDLs and the XSD-TO-PHP library to create objects from a well-defined WSDL. He covers the different modes you can use to "talk SOAP" and using the ZendSoapClientLocal to make a request without the need of a web server.