Amazon CTO Werner Vogel's views on SOA standards ...

A great inerview in ACM Queue: A Conversation with Werner Vogels - Amazon's CTO explains what's behind its growth from online bookstore to e-commerce juggernaut.:

JG: "How many of the current buzzwords, such as SOA, WSDL, SOAP, WS-security, are relevant to you?"

WV: "I would like to distinguish three categories of interfaces here. The first category is the services that make up the Amazon platform. There we use interface specifications such as WSDL, but we use optimized transport and marshalling technology to ensure efficient use of CPU and network resources.

The second category is the interface with our retail partners, which has strict descriptions for XML feed processing, service interfaces, etc., and where we leverage as many standard technologies as possible.

The third category is our public Amazon Web Services, which builds on the platform services and provides REST-like as well as SOAP interfaces. If we look at how developers use these interfaces, in general the REST version is used by small libraries in Perl or PHP as part of a LAMP stack, and the SOAP calls are mainly done by applications that have been built on Java or .NET platforms by consuming our WSDL files and generating proxy objects.

Do we see that customers who develop applications using AWS care about REST or SOAP? Absolutely not! A small group of REST evangelists continue to use the Amazon Web Services numbers to drive that distinction, but we find that developers really just want to build their applications using the easiest toolkit they can find. They are not interested in what goes on the wire or how request URLs get constructed; they just want to build their applications."

So REST vs. SOAP/WebServices debate continues. "Easiest toolkit" is of course what all developers are looking for - ones that hide all the intricacies and dependencies among multiple-vendor stacks out there. But would REST win (because of least dependencies, simplicity)? Would Web Services win (generally elaborate architecture, more vendor activity)?