You may also see one of my blog WCF vs Web Services. The REST Web Service approach is an approach for using REST purely as a communication technology to build SOA. Normally, a SOAP Web services are stateless – but you can easily make SOAP API stateful by changing the code on the server.

The official specifications for SOAP are developed and maintained by the W3C whereas rest based web services is not a protocol per se but an architectural style. – Per source REST came after SOAP with the hope of solving some of its predecessor’s issues. SOAP exposes application –defined services but OData allows access to an entire application-defined data model.

OData requests are simple as like a SQL DB query. SOAP was long the standard approach to web service interfaces, although it’s been dominated by REST in recent years, with REST now representing more than 70% of public APIs according to Stormpath. While the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) has been the dominant approach to web service interfaces for a long time, REST (Representational State Transfer) is quickly winning out and now represents over 70% of public APIs.

In the previous blog, we have seen "What is SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)?In this blog, we will see in details about Web Services, SOAP-based web service, and RESTful web service. These are not really mutually exclusive.


Step 4) The next step is to actually make a configuration change to enable this project to complete work with RESTful web services.This requires to make a change to the file called Web.config.This file appears in the same window as the Webservice project file. My initial feeling about the consternation around SOA vs. APIs was firmly in this camp.

It is possible to adopt the SOA style and implement it with REST, for instance using the JAX-RS API or Spring Boot Actuator, but that discussion is out of scope for this article.

Update 5/12/2016: Watch Stormpath CTO Les Hazlewood’s presentation on REST + JSON API design best practices. The great majority of "services" implemented today are based on REST and not on SOA/SOAP, but enterprises have come to trust the formal SOA architecture for mission-critical applications. RESTful Web services are completely stateless. The REST architecture lays down a set of guidelines you need to follow if you want to provide a RESTful web service, for example, stateless existence and the use of HTTP status codes. Some SOAP services can actually be RESTful. In applications where security/identity management, composability and compliance are absolutely critical, it may be difficult to reframe in RESTful terms. In SOAP… Managing the state of conversation is the complete responsibility of the client itself.

SOAP. However web services which use SOAP request are quite complex to consume in thin client like mobile. A typical SOAP request look like . Caching SOAP vs RESTful web services. So, the question is: When does a web service become a SOAP Web service or a RESTful web service?
Below are the key differences between SOAP vs REST. SOAP is a standard protocol that sends messages using other protocols such as SMTP and HTTP. SOAP was earlier an abbreviation for Simple Object Access Protocol.