2. Index
● What is a webservice?
● Services interoperability
● What is SOAP?
● What is REST?
● Peek at competition
● Characteristics
○ Popularity
○ Simplicity
○ Bandwidth
○ Security
○ Caching
○ State
● Problems
● Conclusion
3. What is a Webservice?
"Software system designed to support
interoperable machine-to-machine interaction
over a network" - W3C
7. Lets take a peek on the competition!
● Yahoo and all its services such as Flickr and
deli.ici.ous use REST
● Amazon and Ebay provide both though
Amazon's internal usage is nearly all REST.
● Google used to provide SOAP for all their
services, but in 2006 they deprecated in
favor of REST.
8. Characteristics: Simplicity
REST:
● Is easy to build - no toolkits required!
● Just figure how to create and modify the URI
to access different web resources!
SOAP:
● Requires a toolkit to form requests and
parse results!
● Requires specific knowledge of a new XML
specification.
9. Characteristics: Bandwidth!
REST:
● can be short!
SOAP:
● requires an XML wrapper around every
request and response
● once namespaces and typing are declared
can take 10 times as many bytes as the
same message in REST.
10. Characteristics: Security!
REST:
● easy to analyze the intent of each message by checking
the HTTP command!
● Certificates and LDAP can delegate authentication and
authorization to the network layer.
● Secure data should never be sent as parameters in the
URI.
SOAP:
● Needs to look into SOAP envelope!
● Authentication and authorization in the application layer.
16. Future?
● SOAP has been evolving in a way that it is
more similar to REST by allowing other
HTTP commands.
● Hypermedia as the engine of application
state.
● Uniform interfaces
● Stateless communications between servers
and clients.