restful web services versus soap
architecture okay so you're formulating
API delivery strategy great but when
you're designing your API you must
answer the age-old question should you
choose soap or rest? soap stands for
simple object access protocol soap has
been around since the late 1990s and
enjoys all of the benefits of long-term
use but so brilliant as simple as the
acronym would suggest rest stands for
representative state transfer and is the
newcomer to the block it seeks to fix
the problems with soap and provide a
truly simple method of accessing web
services. 70% of all public api's are
REST APIs you need to select between
soap and rest based on the programming
language you use the environment in
which you use it and the requirements of
the application soap is definitely the
heavyweight choice for web service
access it provides the following
advantages when compared to rest
language platform and transport
independent rest requires the use of
HTTP works well and distributed
enterprise environments rest assumes
direct point-to-point communication it's
standardized provide significant
pre-build extensibility in the form of
ws standards built-in error handling and
automation when used with certain
language products
rest is easier to use for the most part
and is more flexible it has the
following advantages when compared to
soap no expensive tools required to
interact with the webservice smaller
learning curve it's efficient
soap uses XML for all messages rest can
use smaller message formats it's fast
no extensive processing required and
closer to other web technologies in
design philosophy whether you pick soap
or rest for your web service make sure
you thoroughly test your APIs. ReadyAPI
has a full suite of functional
performance security and virtualization
tools for your API testing needs you can
also learn how to test restful APIs in
our api testing resource center
