Dave Chapelle recently commented in his blog post, REST vs. WS-*: War is Over (If You Want It) , that:

To anybody who's paying attention and who's not a hopeless partisan, the war between REST and WS-* is over. The war ended in a truce rather than crushing victory for one side—it's Korea, not World War II. The now-obvious truth is that both technologies have value, and both will be used going forward.

Eliotte Rusty Harold took up Chapelle's comparison of the REST/WS* debates to the Korean conflict, writing in North and South, that the analogy is quite apt:

Take it one step further though. WS-* is North Korea and REST is South Korea. While REST will go on to become an economic powerhouse with steadily increasing standards of living for all its citizens, WS-* is doomed to sixty+ years of starvation, poverty, tyranny, and defections until it eventually collapses from its own fundamental inadequacies and is absorbed into the more sensible policies of its neighbor to the South.

Harold went further, claiming that:

WS-* fails because it believes massive central planning works better than the individual decisions of millions of web sites. It’s no coincidence that the WS-* community constantly churns out volume after volume of specification and one tool after another. The WS-* community really believes that developers are too stupid to be allowed to manage themselves

Based on Harold's claims, the REST vs WS* debate is still strong, even on ideological grounds. Do you think these two approaches to Web service development are truly incompatible? Where do you stand on this issue?