XML & Web Services Magazine - One Fell Swoop Adam Bosworth: "... Thinking of the Web servers as "objects" is an extremely bad idea. Objects are repositories of state. Conversations with them are by definition not stateless. Because objects are encapsulated, conversations with them are also inherently fine-grained. If you think about it, coarse-grained messages are the antithesis of encapsulation. You are surfacing your state explicitly as a message. ... This is at the heart of Web services. Web services doesn't mean surfacing application "interfaces" to underlying objects through automatically generated SOAP. It means providing well-defined, coarse-grained messages that provide all possible information in one fell swoop (SOAP) and a contract (WSDL) for which messages sent in result in which messages sent back."