SOAP vs REST is a comparison that many programmers or even software architects usually ask themselves when developing APIs for their systems, but what is really the difference between them? Is it that one is superior to the other? Could it be that REST came to replace SOAP? Well, in this article we will try to solve this great doubt.
SOAP, acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol, has been for many years the dominant focus in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for many organizations. It became the preferred protocol to achieve interoperability between applications.
However, its expansion has been delayed by a second alternative of distributed computing called REST (Representational State Transfer) that although it exists since the HTTP protocol appeared (that is, by the year 1991), has taken much relevance in the last decade, being used in almost 70% of public API’s.
But which is better? What communication protocol should I use? To answer them, you have to understand how each of them works and what characteristics differentiate them.
Why SOAP?
SOAP is a mature protocol with a complete and complex specification, capable of providing solutions to almost any need as far as communications are concerned.
It has been designed to expose individual operations called web services. One of the…
