API Workshop - Restful API Introduction
Simple Object Access Protocol SOAP is a Protocol
Soap uses (Extensible Markup Language (XML)) XML as its message format
Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP is the application protocol most used in SOAP services although Soap is not limited to HTTP.
SOAP has three major characteristics:
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extensibility (security and WS-Addressing are among the extensions under development)
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neutrality because it can operate over any protocol
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independence (SOAP allows for any programming model)
The SOAP architecture consists of several layers of specifications for:
- message format
- Message Exchange Patterns (MEP)
- underlying transport protocol bindings
- message processing models
- protocol extensibility
Standard implementations of SOAP utilize XML as the messaging format
Soap is a verbose protocol and it is slower to parse XML than JSON
Soap is a protocol while Representational State Transfer (REST) is more of an architectural style
SOAP is a well-developed protocol used in the Web industry and is standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium W3C.
Rest is the culmination Roy Fieldings PHd Dissertation research
Rest does not a dictate a messaging format so you can in theory use xml, json, and text as message formats.
Modern Restful APIs use JSON as the message format
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