What's the right way to design/structure a Web Service? These two articles show the limitations of SOAP:

Hao He explains why SOAP is not SOA.

And Paul Prescod promotes REST... "[REST] applies the principles of the Web to transaction-oriented services, rather than publishing-oriented sites. When we apply the strategy in the real world, we do so using web technologies such as URIs, HTTP, and XML. Unlike the current generation of web services technologies, however, we make those three technologies central rather than peripheral -- we rethink our web service interface in terms of URIs, HTTP, and XML. It is this rethinking that takes our web services beyond the capabilities of the first generation technologies based on Remote Procedure Call APIs like SOAP-RPC."