Why would one use REST instead of SOAP based services? [closed]

Answer 1

REST is implementation-agnostic and much more transparent, and this makes it great for public APIs, especially for big websites like Flickr, Amazon or Digg that are using their APIs as marketing tools and really want people to consume their data. They don't want to be hand-holding 1000s of novice developers who are trying to debug their scripting language of choice's buggy SOAP library.

Versus SOAP and WSDL, which are better for internal applications, where you have drop-in libraries and known clueful people on both ends. (And you maybe don't have to care about things like Internet-scale load-balancing, HTTP caching etc.) Then you get APIs that are self-documented, preserve types etc. with zero work.

Answer 2

REST is basically just a way to implement web services. It is just a way to use HTTP correctly to query the web services you are trying to hit.

http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer

Answer 3

Got to read Roy Fielding's most excellent dissertation on the topic. He makes an excellent case and was definitely WAY ahead of his time when he wrote it (2000).

Answer 4

RESTful services are much simpler to consume than SOAP based (regular) services. The reason for this is that REST is based on normal HTTP requests which enables intent to be inferred from the type of request being made (GET = retrive, POST = write, DELETE = remove, etc...) and is completely stateless. On the other hand you could argue that it is less flexible as it does away with the concept of a message envelope that contains request context.

In my experience SOAP has been preferred for services within the enterprise and REST has been preferred for services that are exposed as public APIs.

With tools like WCF in the .NET framework it is very trivial to implement a service as REST or SOAP.

Some relevant reading:

• Amazon Web Services Blog: REST vs SOAP
• Dare Obasanjo writes often about REST

Answer 5

I'll assume that when you say "web services" you mean SOAP and the WS-* set of standards. (Otherwise, I could argue that REST services are "web services".)

The canonical argument is that REST services are a closer match to the design of the web - that is, the design of HTTP and associated infrastructure. Thus, using a REST service will be more compatible with existing web tools and techniques.

Of course, once you drill into specifics, you find out that both approaches have strengths in different scenarios. Is it those specifics that you're interested in?

Answer 6

Here's one data point: Amazon offers its APIs in both REST and SOAP formats and 85% of the usage is REST.

REST is easier to implement, easier to understand and higher performance.