Sam Gentile: I have seen a lot of pstings on REST ... vs. SOAP and frankly I don't understand any of this...  someone please articulate in a sentence why I should care. [with SOAP] Its very easy to create web distributed applications.

Analogy: distributed databases vs distributed applications. 

At some point, you will likely want to do both.  And within databases, you will likely find that something like SQL is great for queries, but you want to step back into the [stored] procedure world for updates.

  10:33:29 AM    

Keith is cool.  I tried to explain this to Don Box and Keith (unsurprisingly, Simon already understood the value) over dinner after the devcon.

This actually is the same issue underlying SwA vs DIME.  The issue isn't which is technically superior, the issue is who gets to choose.  Once again, in another Microsoft SOAP implementation (.Net Remoting), there is the ability to provide your own Channels, Formatters, Sinks, Providers, etc.  In ASP.Net...

  10:25:49 AM