RESTFul vs RESTLess (or SOAP) Web service:
REST and SOAP are different concepts altogether, We have summarized the few basic differences between RESTFul and SOAP web service.
| S.No | REST (Representational State Transfer) | SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | REST is an architectural style and REST does not adhere to any specification. | SOAP is protocol and has standard protocol specifications. |
| 2. | REST follows stateless model | SOAP has specifications for stateful model. |
| 3. | REST-based application are simple to implement | SOAP based applications need to understand the SOAP protocol specification. |
| 4. | REST is a paradigm, where we are concerned about the resource(s). | SOAP based application are concerned about the operations. The SOAP message has name of operation to be performed in web service. |
| 5. | REST supports different format like text, JSON, XML etc. | SOAP supports XML only |
| 6. | REST uses HTTP/HTTPS. | SOAP uses “generic” transport channel" |
| 7. | REST is limited by HTTP protocol so it’s transaction support is neither ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) compliant nor can provide two phase commit across distributed transnational resources. | SOAP has comprehensive support for both ACID based transaction management for short-lived transactions and compensation based transaction management for long-running transactions. It also supports two-phase commit protocol across distributed resources |
| 8. | REST has better performance and scalability. REST reads can be cached | SOAP based reads cannot be cached. |
| 9. | REST does n’t have a standard messaging system and expects clients to deal with communication failures by retrying. | SOAP has successful/retry logic built in and provides end-to-end reliability, even through SOAP intermediaries. |