REST

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and Acronym #

REST is an acronym for REpresentational State Transfer and an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems. Roy Fielding first presented it in 2000 in his famous dissertation. ref

• REST was designed specifically for working with components such as

  • media components,
  • files, or even objects on a particular hardware device.

• Any web service that is defined on the principles of REST can be called a RestFul web service.

• A Restful service would use the normal HTTP verbs of GET, POST, PUT and DELETE for working with the required components(resources). REST stands for Representational State Transfer.

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Principle of REST #

Challenges in REST #

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API #

SOAP #

SOAP is a protocol which was designed before REST and came into the picture. The main idea behind designing SOAP was to ensure that programs built on different platforms and programming languages could exchange data in an easy manner. SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.

• SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.
• SOAP is a protocol whereas REST is an architectural pattern.
• SOAP uses service interfaces to expose its functionality to client applications while REST uses Uniform Service locators to access to the components on the hardware device.
• SOAP needs more bandwidth for its usage whereas REST doesn’t need much bandwidth.
• Comparing SOAP vs REST API, SOAP only works with XML formats whereas REST work with plain text, XML, HTML and JSON.
• SOAP cannot make use of REST whereas REST can make use of SOAP.

When to use SOAP #

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Challenges of SOAP #

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