Saturday, April 7, 2012

Advantages of REST over SOAP


  • REST is simpler and light weight than SOAP.
  • REST can straight away provide the data in the JSON format. Where as in SOAP additional step of converting the XML to JSON is needed, which is an overhead. 
  • Any browse can act as the REST client, where as for SOAP services, SOAP client must be wrote to access the SOAP services.
  • SOAP uses the WSDL to expose the we services, which is complex. Where REST is simpler to use.
  • Transactions are supported in SOAP where as in REST it is not.
  • JAX-WS is the JAVA API for the SOAP services. JAX-RS is the java API for building the REST ful web services.

Tutorial of RESTful web services using the Jersey(JAX-RS 311 reference implementation) can be found at Restful web services tutorial.

More concepts and detailed explanation on Restful web services can be found at Concepts of REST

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