REST vs. SOAP: How to choose the best Web service

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/tip/REST-vs-SOAP-How-to-choose-the-best-Web-service

Do similar questions trouble you? Ever wondered what could be the solution to such problems? To date, we have been familiar with consuming Web services within the application that fetches the data from various databases.

There is a different perspective, where the databases act as the service consumer in contrast to the normal norm of acting as a service provider. Here is how you can invoke a Web service via database stored procedures.

Web services overview

A Web service, in very broad terms, is a method of communication between two applications or electronic devices over the World Wide Web (WWW). Web services are of two kinds: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST).

SOAP defines a standard communication protocol (set of rules) specification for XML-based message exchange. SOAP uses different transport protocols, such as HTTP and SMTP. The standard protocol HTTP makes it easier for SOAP model to tunnel across firewalls and proxieswithout any modifications to the SOAP protocol. SOAP can sometimes be slower than middleware technologies like CORBA or ICE due to its verbose XML format.

REST describes a set of architectural principles by which data can be transmitted over a standardized interface (such as HTTP). REST does not contain an additional messaging layer and focuses on design rules for creating stateless services. A client can access the resource using the unique URI and a representation of the resource is returned. With each new resource representation, the client is said to transfer state. While accessing RESTful resources with HTTP protocol, the URL of the resource serves as the resource identifier and GET, PUT, DELETE, POST and HEAD are the standard HTTP operations to be performed on that resource.

REST vs. SOAP

Multiple factors need to be considered when choosing a particular type of Web service, that is between REST and SOAP. The table below breaks down the features of each Web service based on personal experience.

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REST

• The RESTful Web services are completely stateless. This can be tested by restarting the server and checking if the interactions are able to survive.
  
• Restful services provide a good caching infrastructure over HTTP GET method (for most servers). This can improve the performance, if the data the Web service returns is not altered frequently and not dynamic in nature.
  
• The service producer and service consumer need to have a common understanding of the context as well as the content being passed along as there is no standard set of rules to describe the REST Web services interface.
  
• REST is particularly useful for restricted-profile devices such as mobileand PDAs for which the overhead of additional parameters like headers and other SOAP elements are less.
  
• REST services are easy to integrate with the existing websites and are exposed with XML so the HTML pages can consume the same with ease. There is hardly any need to refactor the existing website architecture. This makes developers more productive and comfortable as they will not have to rewrite everything from scratch and just need to add on the existing functionality.
  
• REST-based implementation is simple compared to SOAP.

SOAP

• The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) contains and describes the common set of rules to define the messages, bindings, operations and location of the Web service. WSDL is a sort of formal contract to define the interface that the Web service offers.
  
• SOAP requires less plumbing code than REST services design, (i.e., transactions, security, coordination, addressing, trust, etc.) Most real-world applications are not simple and support complex operations, which require conversational state and contextual information to be maintained. With the SOAP approach, developers need not worry about writing this plumbing code into the application layer themselves.
  
• SOAP Web services (such as JAX-WS) are useful in handling asynchronous processing and invocation.
  
• SOAP supports several protocols and technologies, including WSDL, XSDs, SOAP, WS-Addressing

In a nutshell, when you're publishing a complex application program interface (API) to the outside world, SOAP will be more useful. But when something with a lower learning curve, and with lightweight and faster results and simple transactions (i.e., CRUD operations) is needed, my vote goes to REST.