For those dealing with APIs on a daily basis (or even the casual API-er) you'll find this post from Phil Sturgeon interesting. In it he takes on the opinion that's shared in this article from Pakal De Bonchamp that "REST is the new SOAP".

Enough people have asked me about the article REST is the new SOAP that I felt it justifies a write up. [...] The entire article is full of common misunderstandings about REST and HTTP. Despite dedicating my career to trying to educate people through these confusions, they continue to be rife. Clearly I am not being loud enough, writing effectively enough, or doing a good enough job. That is the frustration you might hear in my writing, but nothing is aimed at the author.

In his post Phil goes through the original article, pulling out quotes and responding to them one at a time. He shares opinions on HTTP verb operations, REST architecture, HTTP response code usage and the use of caching and statelessness in the API functionality.