The Sept/October 2014 IEEE Software has an article Service-Oriented Architecture and Legacy Systems, which contains a number of surprising conclusions.
Ultimately, the message in HTTP is plaintext, which any system or programming language can produce.
Appears on page 16, describing how a legacy system can be wrapped in a SOA service. This is an essentially correct statement, but neither helpful nor realistic. Given that statement, one might expect to find that all web services are written in SNOBOL or raw perl. It also neglects the several feet of paper defining all the standards to which the code must comply:XML, XML Schema, Unicode, SOAP, WSDL, HTTP and TCP.