REST vs SOAP

For the Advanced Analysis and Design course at my university I have to compare REST with SOAP. My first reaction as I heard this was WTF. How is it possible to compare a strictly defined protocol with an approach idea like REST. I don't know if my professor doesn't understand the concepts of both or if this is the realization he wants us to get. For the people that don't know the difference here a little rundown. SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol and was initially designed to call functions/methods on remote machines (basically RPC shredded through the XML buzzword machine) whereas REST stands for Representational State Transfer and describes how the resources in the internet can be arranged and talk to each other. Mainly described by the example of http. Of course you can use both methods to get data from some source (Amazon for example) but the general ideas are so fundamentally different that a real thorough comparison is not possible. Sometimes I do wonder. If you would only read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer you would understand my point. That simple.

Flamewar commence: