[Simon Fell] Mark Baker emailed me to point out what the issue with RPC part of SOAP and REST is [thanks Mark]. So are people using SOAP in the messaging style ?, I don't know of a single toolkit that defaults to messaging style SOAP [I discount ASP.NET in this case, as although it defaults to doc/literal SOAP, the messages it defines have RPC semantics]
In the SOAP Toolkit, I pushed to get the SOAP Messaging Object (SMO) Framework feature added. SMO provides a message based alternative to the RPC programming model. I believe strongly that the programming model is one of the things matters a lot when tricking* people into building a loosely coupled distributed systems. You are right, a doc/lit wire format isn't the same thing at all. (The other thing that matters is baked in support for versioning, and doc/lit is a useful pre-condition for that.)
Unfortunately, I have been unable to get the all the resources needed to do SMO right. For one thing, a key part of it is a wizard that reads XDR schemas and generates VB classes that act as an typed programming model over an XML document. That wizard should be updated to read XSD schema (and WSDL files), but that isn't ever going to happen (the STK walks a fine line between providing good SOAP support for COM programmers and "encouraging" developers to move to .Net). In the 3.0 release, the core SMO Framework classes are included as sample code and the generator is gone.
* SOAP implementations should help a programmer build a well design distributed system without them having to think about it.
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