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REST Alternatives

REST

Representational State Transfer

  • Architectural style for distributed hypermedia system
  • HTTP standard (convention for building HTTP services)
  • URL = end point + parameters

Characteristics

  • Variety of data formats
  • Low bandwidth
  • Easy to understand HTTP

SOAP

Simple Object Access Protocol

Characteristics

  • ws security (web service security)
    • exclusive to SOAP
    • quality of protection through message integrity, confidentiality, and single message authentication
  • built-in retry logic (REST needs manual client retry)
  • has built-in ACID compliance
  • function driven WSDL (web service description language)
    • shows methods and params to client which allows automation
  • SOAP can't cache connection limit like REST

WSDL

Web Service Description Language

What it does

  • WSDL allows for automation of client requests

What is it

  • WSDL is used to describe web services and it is written in XML
    • It specifies the location of the service, and the methods of the service
    • Following elements are used to describe:
      • <type> defines the (XML schema) data types used by the web service
      • <message> defines the data elements for each operation
      • <portType> describes the operations that can be performed and the messages involved
      • <binding> defines the protocol and data format for each port type

Header Definitions

When making request, you need to specify in the header what type of content you are fetching for

Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Content-Type:: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
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