|
Category: WCF
view more software Tips and Tricks
Updated: 10/15/2013 05:10 AM
Author: Shiju Mathews Status: Resolved. |
|
SOAP stands for “Simple Object Access Protocol” and REST stands for “Representational state transfer”. SOAP is a method of transferring messages, or small amounts of information, over the Internet. SOAP messages are formatted in XML. SOAP defines a standard communication protocol (set of rules) specification for XML-based message exchange. SOAP uses different transport protocols, such as HTTP, JMS and SMTP. The standard protocol HTTP makes it easier for SOAP model to tunnel across firewalls and proxies without any modifications to the SOAP protocol. SOAP can sometimes be 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). HTTP is the only supported transport fir REST.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. 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. 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. The acronym REST stands for Representational State Transfer, this basically means that each unique URL is a representation of some object. You can get the contents of that object using an HTTP. |