Web Services: A Comparison of Soap and Rest Services

Abstract

The interest on Web services has been growing rapidly in these couple of years since their start of use. A web service would be described as a method for exchanging/communicating information between devices over a network. Often, when deciding which service would fit on the architecture design to develop a product, then the question rises which service to use and when?SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST (Representational State Transfer) are the two most used protocols to exchange messages, so choosing one over the other has its own advantages and disadvantages. In this paper we have addressed the differences and best practices when to use one over the other.