Web Services: REST vs SOAP
In the world of web services, two major client-to-server communication systems dominate the field. These systems exist to standardize the mediums and format of communication between clients and servers. Originally developed by Microsoft, the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) was used for almost every web service, but nowadays the Representational State Transfer (REST) is used in 83%¹ or more of API integrations. REST has grown in popularity as many developers seek to easily create cloud or mobile apps, or automated business applications that leverage SaaS, PaaS, or LaaS apps, although SOAP still dominates in production enterprise-level web services. In order to compare and contrast these systems, it should be explained that SOAP and REST should not be compared directly since SOAP is intended to be a protocol while REST is a software architectural style. In web services, a protocol is… Read More »Web Services: REST vs SOAP