I had a request to interview for a contract job using web services. I've recently worked with .NET Web services that were implemented using SOAP and done Java web services previously but wanted a refresher. I went to look for a SOAP web service on Google to test with and it seems like Google has switched entirely to REST. I never really thought about it but I guess REST is another type of web service. I just kind of associated web services with SOAP. Wikipedia has a pretty good definition of web services.
As it turns out a lot of the major web API players are switching to REST - which is good. When I used REST for a web site integrating with Amazon's IMDB database it was much simpler and cleaner to use. I had previously reviewed a technical book and tried to test various SOAP web service software components and spent hours getting any of them to work correctly. REST is so much easier, cleaner, simpler - I wondered why everyone wasn't using it. Seems like now they are.
This is kind of funny because I went to an interview after working on the Amazon project and one of the people I was interviewing with commented that he had never met anyone who used REST before "in real life".
Here's an article comparing REST vs. SOAP web services:
Rest vs. SOAP Web Services
