SOAP and REST have been widely used for web services. SOAP is
developed by Microsoft in 1998. Due to the complexity, REST has been introduced
in 2006. Below table is the differentiation:
SOAP
|
REST
|
|
Transport Protocol
|
||
HTTP
|
Support
|
Support
|
TPC
|
Support
|
-
|
SMTP
|
Support
|
-
|
MQ
|
Support
|
-
|
IIOP
|
Support
|
-
|
Security
|
||
HTTPS
|
Support
|
Support
|
WS-Security (SOAP Security Extension)
|
Support
|
-
|
Output Format
|
||
XML
|
Support
|
Support
|
JSON
|
-
|
Support
|
MINE
|
-
|
Support
|
Other
|
||
Standards Based
|
Yes (Based on WS-*
Specification)
|
No (Using HTTP
Verbs POST, HEAD, GET, PUT and DELETE)
|
Caching
|
No
|
Yes (GET operations
can be cached)
|
Performance
|
Good
|
Better (because of
caching)
|
Simplicity
|
No
|
Yes
|
File Transfer
|
-
|
-
|
Who is using?
|
Google seems to be
consistent in implementing their web services to use SOAP, with the exception of Blogger, which uses XML-RPC. You will find SOAP web services in lots of enterprises
software as well.
|
All of Yahoo’s web
services use REST, including Flickr. Both eBay and Amazon have web services
for both REST and SOAP.
|