API features individualizing of web services: REST and SOAP

Abstract

Web Services are combination of open protocols and standards to allow communication between client and server. It provides an interoperability between contrasting applications. Representational state Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) are the two main popular used web services now-a-days. REST is an architectural style based, whereas SOAP is a underlying protocol. Both services are used to handle the communication on the world wide web (www). Both services have some advantages and drawbacks and it is the decision of web developer to decide which service is best to use according to its requirements. The aim of this research work is to design a REST API and SOAP API by JAX-RS and JAX-WS, respectively and gives a comparative analysis of Application Programming Interface (API) features (in terms of response time, memory usage, execution speed and so on) of these services by using API testing tool like Postman. This gives insight view of which service is better to use as per requirements. The result of experiments shows that the response time of SOAP is approximate takes 4ms to 7ms more than REST. It has been observed that as number of API increases, SOAP takes approximate 1MB to 2MB more memory usage than REST.