Difference between SOAP and REST

                                Difference Between soap and REST

SOAP

- A service architecture
- XML based
- Runs on HTTP but envelopes the message
- Slower than REST
- Very mature, a lot of functionality
- Not suitable for browser-based clients

REST

- A service architecture (resource-oriented)
- Uses the HTTP headers to hold meta information (although it is protocol-agnostic)
- Can be used with XML, JSON or whatever necessary
- Usually used with JSON due to the easily parsable content
- Faster than SOAP
- It uses semantic media types

The Representational State Transfer (REST) is another architectural pattern (resource-oriented), an alternative to SOAP. Unlike SOAP, RESTful applications use the HTTP build-in headers (with a variety of media-types) to carry meta information and use the GET, POST, PUT and DELETE verbs to perform CRUD operations. REST is resource-oriented and uses clean URLs (or RESTful URLs). 

 

For example :

http://www.developingthefuture.com/index.php?page=foo

 

becomes

 

http://www.developingthefuture.com/foo

 

This kind of URLs syntax greatly improves both visibility and usability. It doesn’t use any query strings, and it also provides certain SEO benefits (the crawlers just love plain text). The body of the REST message can be XML, JSON or any other format, although JSON is usually the preferred choice. On the other hand, you can’t use JSON with SOAP. Or at least not entirely, because SOAP uses XML by definition for it’s envelope. It should also mentioned that REST is, by design, protocol-agnostic, although it is usually used with HTTP