From this paper by Steve Loughran and Edmund Smith:

This paper examines the current SOAP APIs in Java, and in particular the Java API for XML-based RPC, commonly known as JAX-RPC, which is effectively the standard API for SOAP on the Java platform. We claim that JAX-RPC, and indeed any SOAP API that relies upon a perfect two- way mapping between XML data and native language objects is fundamentally flawed. Furthermore, we claim that the attempt JAX-RPC makes to extend the remote method invocation metaphor to SOAP services is counterproductive.

+1 +1 +1. I’ve rarely read a paper I could so thoroughly agree with — I hope Alpine is going to be huge success!