Main differences between SOAP and RESTful web services in Java

Question

For now I have a slight idea about the differences between SOAP and RESTful services   My question is when I should use SOAP  and when I should use RESTful  which one is  better  when it comes to performance speed or request handling   I m implementing it for the first time in RESTful  Java  and I want know more about it  I ve dealt with SOAP before   This is a follow-up question to this post

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REST stands for representational state transfer whereas SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol  SOAP defines its own security where as REST inherits security from the underlying transport  SOAP does not support error handling  but REST has built-in error handling  REST is lightweight and does not require XML parsing  REST can be consumed by any client  even a web browser with Ajax and JavaScript  REST consumes less bandwidth  it does not require a SOAP header for every message    REST is useful over any protocol which provide a URI  Ignore point 5 for REST as mentioned below in the picture

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REST vs  SOAP  SOAP     SOAP is simple object access protocol that run on TCP UDP SMTP     SOAP read and write request response messages in XML format     SOAP uses interface in order to define the services     SOAP is more secure as it has its own security and well defined standards     SOAP follows RPC and Document style to define web services     SOAP uses SOAP-UI as client tools for testing   REST    REST is representational state transfer that uses underlying HTTP protocols     REST is stateless     REST is an architectural style that is used to describe and define web services     REST can read and write request response messages in JSON XML Plain HTML     REST uses URI for each resource that is used in web service A resource can be image text method etc     REST uses set of verbs  like HTTP s GET  POST  PUT  DELETE     REST is easy to develop and easy to manage as compared to SOAP UI     REST has light-weight client tools or plugins that can easily be integrated inside a browser     REST services are cacheable

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REST vs  SOAP Web Services      I am seeing a lot of new web services are implemented using a REST   style architecture these days rather than a SOAP one  Lets step back a   second and explain what REST is       What is a REST web service       The acronym REST stands for representational state transfer  and this   basically means that each unique URL is a representation of some   object  You can get the contents of that object using an HTTP GET  to   delete it  you then might use a POST  PUT  or DELETE to modify the   object  in practice most of the services use a POST for this        Who s using REST       All of Yahoo s web services use REST  including Flickr and Delicious       APIs use it  pubsub  bloglines  Technorati  and both eBay  and Amazon   have web services for both REST and SOAP       Who s using SOAP       Google seams to be consistent in implementing their web services to   use SOAP  with the exception of Blogger  which uses XML-RPC  You will   find SOAP web services in lots of enterprise software as well       REST vs  SOAP      As you may have noticed the companies I mentioned that are using REST   APIs haven t been around for very long  and their APIs came out this   year mostly  So REST is definitely the trendy way to create a web   service  if creating web services could ever be trendy  lets face it   you use soap to wash  and you rest when your tired   The main   advantages of REST web services are          Lightweight - not a lot of extra XML markup Human Readable Results   Easy to build - no toolkits required  SOAP also has some advantages          Easy to consume - sometimes Rigid - type checking  adheres to a   contract Development tools For consuming web services  its sometimes a   toss up between which is easier  For instance Google s AdWords web   service is really hard to consume  in ColdFusion anyway   it uses SOAP   headers  and a number of other things that make it kind of difficult    On the converse  Amazon s REST web service can sometimes be tricky to   parse because it can be highly nested  and the result schema can vary   quite a bit based on what you search for       Whichever architecture you choose make sure its easy for developers   to access it  and well documented    Freitag  P   2005    REST vs SOAP Web Services   Retrieved from http   www petefreitag com item 431 cfm on June 13  2010

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SOAP Web services    If your application needs a guaranteed level of reliability and security then SOAP offers additional standards to ensure this type of operation  If both sides  service provider and service consumer  have to agree on the exchange format then SOAP gives the rigid specifications for this type of interaction    RestWeb services    Totally stateless operations  for stateless CRUD  Create  Read  Update  and Delete  operations  Caching situations  If the information needs to be cached

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REST is easier to use for the most part and is more flexible  Unlike SOAP  REST doesn   t have to use XML to provide the response  We can find REST-based Web services that output the data in the Command Separated Value  CSV   JavaScript Object Notation  JSON  and Really Simple Syndication  RSS  formats   We can obtain the output we need in a form that   s easy to parse within the language we need for our application REST is more efficient  use smaller message formats   fast and closer to other Web technologies in design philosophy

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REST is almost always going to be faster   The main advantage of SOAP is that it provides a mechanism for services to describe themselves to clients  and to advertise their existence     REST is much more lightweight and can be implemented using almost any tool  leading to lower bandwidth and shorter learning curve   However  the clients have to know what to send and what to expect   In general  When you re publishing an API to the outside world that is either complex or likely to change  SOAP will be more useful   Other than that  REST is usually the better option

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SOAP  Simple Object Access Protocol  SOAP  is a standard  an XML language  defining a message architecture and message formats  It is used by Web services  It contains a description of the operations   WSDL is an XML-based language for describing Web services and how to access them  It will run on SMTP  HTTP  FTP  etc  It requires middleware support and well-defined mechanism to define services like WSDL XSD and WS-Policy  SOAP will return XML based data  REST  Representational State Transfer  RESTful  web services   They are second-generation Web services   RESTful web services communicate via HTTP rather than SOAP-based services and do not require XML messages or WSDL service-API definitions  For REST middleware is not required  only HTTP support is needed  It is a WADL standard  REST can return XML  plain text  JSON  HTML  etc

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SOAP web service always make a POST operation whereas using REST you can choose specific HTTP methods like GET  POST  PUT  and DELETE   Example  to get an item using SOAP you should create a request XML  but in the case of REST you can just specify the item id in the URL itself

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REST has no WSDL  Web Description Language  interface definition   REST is over HTTP  but SOAP can be over any transport protocols such as HTTP  FTP  SMTP  JMS  etc

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Difference between REST and SOAP

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REST is an architecture   REST will give human-readable results   REST is stateless   REST services are easily cacheable    SOAP is a protocol  It can run on top of JMS  FTP  and HTTP

[java] Main differences between SOAP and RESTful web services in Java

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