In the world of mashups, applications are often composed from data and service feeds, which is a lighterweight style compared to traditional methods of developing applications. However, there are various ways to create a web service. The two most common service interfaces are SOAP and REST, although they were designed with different use cases in mind. SOAP is a fairly heavyweight service interface with a lot of infrastructure associated with it, while REST is a very simple, easy-to-build service interface.

Many customers are using Kapow robots to create REST based web services to connect to business functionality exposed by web applications. Others use REST as a simple way to create a web service to go fetch a piece of data. REST is often a preferred approach for building simple services, because it scales well and has very little processing overhead associated with it, compared to SOAP.