Difference between RSS and Web API?

Question

I have searched a lot on web to find a satisfactory answer but I did't get an answer.

Some says RSS is static xml while in web API we make a proper format of request and get a proper format of response

Kindly help me on this thanks,

Answer 1

The reason RESTful APIs are so inconsistent across different services is because REST is not a standard, it's not a protocol. It's an architectural style. Some things to take into consideration for your API would be; what HTTP verbs to support, what URI structure to follow, how to consistently return error messages, how to handle partial selection, versioning, authentication, pagination, and so on and so forth.. There is no specific right way of doing it (it's debated often), but there are many ways that are not so great!

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, which is essentially a format for delivering regularly changing web content. RSS feeds allow a user to subscribe to their favorite news sources, blogs, websites, and other digital properties, and then receive the latest content from all those different areas or sites in one place, without having to repeatedly visit each individual site.

Answer 2

Your question sounds like "What difference is between Ford Focus and a taxi service?" Ford Focus can be one of the cars in a taxi service. But nothing more.

RSS is a standard, which describes specific format of news feed. You can have a standalone locally stored RSS-formatted file, remote stored RSS-file somewhere on a server, or you can have a web-service which constructs RSS-formatted file on the fly. It will be RSS in all three cases because RSS is something that describes internal structure of a file.

Web Service is, basically, an application which runs somewhere on a server, accepts requests, processes it according to the application's internal logic, and then provides answers. Web service can take any kind of requests and provide any kind on responses, including RSS-formatted ones. Hope that makes things a bit clearer for you.