Web Services or Custom Protocol?

Question

I have no experience with web services. Historically I've built client-server systems using proprietary communication protocols (even they happen to be XML). I just spent a few hours looking over Axis2 and it sent a shudder down my spine. The learning curve of WS scares me, and seeing all that XML surround so little functionality makes me wonder if it's worth the trouble.

How do you decide whether you need to use Web Services or a custom communication protocol? What are the advantages/disadvantages of each approach and what use-cases are they best suited for?

Please post a clear guideline, not an opinion piece :)

Answer 1

Build RESTful web APIs; then you get a lot of automatic caching and etc benefits that you don't get if you use other methods (SOAP, XML-RPC, etc)

See this post for more details

Another benefit is that if you build a RESTful API for your code to use, you can potentially let your users take advantage of it too - they often have uses for your product that you never dreamed of.