Jax-RS was one of the most mentioned topics in the java one session. Now everyone tries to use jersey +json to develop new applications. I believe, that this is more than a hype, because json and restful were used by other languages for years. But it will depend on your use case whether to take soap or rs ws. I will still stay with soap in terms of application communication because of the easy creation of stubs and even other features (f.i. security) matter. The overhead of soap is, as discussed a lot, not really a big problem. It’s more the ease for use, for f.i. frontend developers, that matter.