Q:

Preferred choice for SOA implementation - SOAP or REST?

Given current maturity of REST frameworks/APIs, which should be the better option for a new SOA project - soap or rest?
PS - Excuse me for a being a noob, let me know if asking a wrong question!

A:

This is a bit up in the air. Now I am generally a bit biased towards REST, but REST and SOAP are two different animals. REST is more of an architecture style where as SOAP is a delineated protocol. Having said that, I have definitely written many SOAP interfaces.
One thing that I would like to note is that with REST you are not limited on the representation of the data, so it could be in XML, JSON, YAML, etc. As a result your data can be much more lightweight. However, for SOAP you must use XML. One thing to definitely take into account though is how this service is going to be consumed.
Generally, if your service is going to be used by a Mobile Device(Android,iOS, Windows Phone) there are a lot more frameworks around REST, so it would be wise to utilize those existing frameworks. If you have older large corporations connecting to this they are likely going to have existing SOAP implementations so they are going to be more comfortable with accessing SOAP services.
I would say however that providing both is not really that far of a stretch. If you have a service at /api/v1/customers << this could be your rest URL and for the SOAP protocol use /api/v1/soap/customers/*. As long as your business logic, if there is any is encapsulated into different functions, then both the SOAP and REST implementations can call it.  
I hope that this is helpful, but with many questions around technology, don't try to force your use case fit the technology. Your technology choice should flow from the use case.

