This document compares REST and SOAP architectures for web services. REST uses HTTP requests and simple XML, while SOAP uses a complex XML format. REST has advantages of being lightweight, human readable, scalable, and not requiring additional tools. The key aspects of REST are that any HTTP client can communicate with any HTTP server using only the four main HTTP methods, without configuration. Overall, REST is presented as the more lightweight and preferable approach compared to SOAP for web services.

1. EEDC
Execution
REST Vs SOAP,
Why Use REST
Environments for Architecture for Web
Distributed Services?
Computing
European Master in Distributed
Computing, EMDC
Homework number: 2
Personal number: EEDC-71
Ioanna Tsalouchidou –
ioannatsalouchidou@gmail.com
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2. Web Services
machine-to-machine communication

SOAP - based

HTTP - based
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3. What is SOAP?
Simple Object Access Protocol: Protocol specification for
exchanging structured information in the implementation of
Web Services

No specific encoding for the message body

Verbose XML format → considerably slower

Response caching difficult, POST-requests, complex
XML
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4. What is REST
REpresentation State Transfer: software architecture for
distributed hypermedia systems as the World Wide Web

For REST everything is resources

Simple point-to-point communication over HTTP using XML
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5. What is good about it ?
Advantages:

Lightweight – not a lot of extra XML markup

Human Readable Results

Easy to build – no toolkits required

Scalability of components interactions

Generality of interfaces

Independent deployment of components
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6. Key part 1
Any HTTP client talks with any HTTP server

No further configuration needed

No need to know the method names
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7. Key part 2
Use of only four methods which are already supported by
HTTP

GET

POST

PUT

DELETE
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8. Which is preferred?
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9. Which one is more lightweight ?
REST Vs
SOAP
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