[static_typed]

RESTful services still work in those situations where they are correctly applied. Maybe what has happened is some of the less mature and more shrill developers have stepped back from their war on any Web service that doesn't fit their dogmatic rest-tard view of the world. There are plenty of valid XML-RPC based services that continue to run well despite the whining that someone somewhere did not yet have a ruby gem to connect their ruby on fails site to it and that it was simply unacceptable - and so complain on twatter they must!

So in short - no, REST works, use it in the right places, and remember kids - not every Web service or endpoint has to expose a REST based interface.

[Roboprog]

Simple XML-RPC interfaces can be OK, and they often have real documentation available, since they are not assumed to be magic, and that documentation will be needed. (we use several of these from a few vendors at work, they were not problematic to set up)

I've experienced a lot of pain trying to get working clients generated and configured from some magic WSDL (SOAP interface definition file), though. For a supposedly self describing standard, each time I have had to write a client, it was very much an "interesting" adventure.

My gut tells me there are many "Web Services" consultants who do not like REST because it simplifies things to the point where they are out of a job :-)