Web Services

Web services are the services available on web which can be easily consumed by any device or application.

Web service helps to expose business logic through an API interface where different systems communicate over network.

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Type of Web Services

1.      SOAP Web Services

2.      REST Web Services

SOAP Web Services –

SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. It is a XML-based protocol for accessing web services.

SOAP is a W3C recommendation for communication between two applications.

SOAP is XML based protocol. It is platform independent and language independent.

REST Web Services –

Restful web services are built to work best on the Web. Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style that specifies constraints, such as the uniform interface, that if applied to a web service induce desirable properties, such as performance, scalability, and modifiability that enable services to work best on the Web. In the REST architectural style, data and functionality are considered resources and are accessed using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), typically links on the Web. The resources are acted upon by using a set of simple, well-defined operations. The REST architectural style constrains an architecture to a client/server architecture and is designed to use a stateless communication protocol, typically HTTP. In the REST architecture style, clients and servers exchange representations of resources by using a standardized interface and protocol.

Rest Web service	Soap Web service
SOAP is a protocol(Simple Object Access protocol)	REST is an architectural style (Representational State Transfer )
SOAP use only Simple Object Access Protocol.	REST can use any protocol like HTTP, SOAP.
SOAP uses services interfaces to expose the business logic.	REST uses URI to expose business logic.
JAX-WS is the java API for SOAP web services.	JAX-RS is the java API for RESTful web services.
SOAP defines standards to be strictly followed.	REST does not define too much standards like SOAP.
SOAP requires more bandwidth and resource than REST.	REST requires less bandwidth and resource than SOAP.
SOAP defines its own security.	RESTful web services inherits security measures from the underlying transport.
SOAP permits XML data format only.	REST permits different data format such as Plain text, HTML, XML, Command Separated Value (CSV), JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
SOAP is less preferred than REST.	REST more preferred than SOAP.
Microsoft originally developed SOAP to take the place of older technologies that don’t work well on the Internet such as the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)	The term representational state transfer was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation