Via Steve Vinoski: Where HTTP fails SOAP

It’s the little niggling details (like being able to multiplex requests over a single network connection) that bite you when you try to use SOAP/HTTP in certain scenarios.

SOAP over HTTP is a great protocol for interoperability, because everyone speaks it. But inside the firewall, in back office scenarios, there are other transport protocols that make more sense. Ideally, you want a messaging stack that hides these details from you so that switching between SOAP-over-HTTP and SOAP-over-Blah is transparent to your app code.

Oh, and to avoid the standard “HTTP is an application protocol/no, it’s a transport protocol” argument, I’m quite happy to say that (as of Beta 2) Indigo will let you use HTTP in either mode. You can use it as a transport protocol or an application protocol; it don’t matter to Indigo.