What to use SOAP or REST

Choosing between SOAP and REST style web services for an architectural solution should depend on the consumers of the service in my opinion.  To help me make the right decision I decided to draw up a comparison matrix below showing the pros and cons of each service style.

Feature	SOAP	REST
Development effort	Having comprehensive toolkits  make development easier.	Toolkits are not required.  However additional work is required to map URI paths the specific handlers.
Describing available Interface definitions.	Generally a WSDL is available to describe the available contracts and by using client tools proxies maybe easily generated	A document is normally manually written and is  published as a web page. There is a machine readable version called WADL but is not widely used.
Message format	XML based format. Has SOAP and WS-* specific markup. This can make the payload quite large.	Can craft your own however common formats are XML or JASON. Does not require XML parsing. Human readable results.
Message Transport	Can use a number of transport protocols such as HTTP/S, TCP, SMTP, UDP, JMS etc	Normally HTTP/HTTPS. Other protocols are supported with extra development effort.
Message contracts	SOAP requires a formal contract to exist between the provider and consumer.  If  rigid type checking is required then use SOAP. Focus is on accessing named operations.	Has a form of dynamic contract and relies on documentation. Focus is  on accessing named resources.
Handling of complex domain objects	Complex domain models can be easily represented using soap.	Not so easy to handle complex models.  Excellent choice if you only require CRUD operations  over a RDBMS.
Transactional support	WS* protocol supports transactions which is geared towards SOAP.	Has no built in support.  The HTTP protocol cannot provide two-phase commit across distributed transactional resources.
Reliable messaging	Built into the WS-* protocol. Has built in successful/retry logic.	Clients need to deal with communication failures.
State management	Supports both contextual information and conversation state management.	The server cannot maintain any state. State management must be handled by the client
Caching	No supported	HTTP Get operations can be cached.
Message Encoding	Supports text and binary encoding	Limited to text only
Testing of services	Requires unit tests to be developed or 3 rd party test tools.	Can simply use a web browser and view the results.
Security	Supports enterprise security  using the WS-Security protocol. Use SOAP if intermediary devices are not trusted.	Use SSL protocol for point-to-point. Also can easily identify the intent of a request based on the HTTP verb.
Client side development complexity	Toolkits are required to easily consume the service.	Can consumed by any client, even a web browser using Ajax and Javascript.
Maintainability	Easier to maintain due to tight data contracts and standards.	In the long-run can be much expensive to maintain due to lack of standards
Popularity	Mainly in enterprise applications that required WS-* features.	Used by most  publically  available  web services.

My conclusion is there is no right or wrong approach for building web services with either SOAP or REST, it depends on the requirements of the consumers.

I tend to lean towards REST for CRUD type web services that integrate with websites and  SOAP for integration between critical enterprise systems that require the WS-* features such as transaction support and reliable communications.

I hope anyone reading this will find this blog helpful in making the correct architectural decision and please let me know I have left anything out.