Gregor Hohpe talking a lot of sense

"The main characteristic of an SOA is that of a loosely coupled, document-oriented interaction model, according to Hohpe. He didn't think that SOA is a new, life-changing architecture because XML messaging-based services have been around for a while."

and

"Architecture is based on patterns and intent, not technology selection, according to Hohpe. Conversation models, asynchrony, document-orientation, granularity, decoupling and management are more important."

Wisdom in a talk by Gregor Hohpe.

So, the next time somebody says to you "lets just use SOAP", say "Great!" and then ask him/her for a quick run-down of the proposed conversation models, the synch/asynch selections, the granularity, the semantics of the payloads. I'll bet you that nine times out of ten none of the above will have been thought through. SOAP hides all that stuff right?

Yeah, right.