Is RESTful faster than SOAP? and when to use one of them?

Question

Duplicate: This is a duplicate of "What are the best uses of REST services?" and many others. Please close it.

In web development:

Should i learn RESTful services very well and make all my future projects using it? Is it faster than SOAP services? When to use which?

Are there certain cases I should prefer one of them?

Answer 1

In my experience, SOAP adds some overhead that you can avoid by making a RESTful service. That being said, in your decision, you should consider your audience. If you are expecting to have a large variety of outside-world consumers of your service, I would recommend SOAP, because there are a lot of tools that automatically generate a programmatic interface to it.

Some web services, like PayPal, offer multiple alternatives, so you could also consider choosing both.

Answer 2

REST should be faster than SOAP in most cases since it is more light weight, less overhead.

But there are some situations in which you need the functionality that is in that overhead.

Unless you want to standardise on one (this reduces the number of technologies in your solution, and therefore the complexity), the rule of thumb would be use REST when you can and SOAP where you must.

Answer 3

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standard an XML language defining a message architecture and message formats, is used by Web services it contain a description of the operations. WSDL is an XML-based language for describing Web services and how to access them. will run on SMTP,HTTP,FTP etc. Requires middleware support, well defined mechanisam to define services like WSDL+XSD, WS-Policy SOAP will return XML based data SOAP provide standards for security and reliability

Representational State Transfer (RESTful) web services. they are second generation Web Services. RESTful web services, communicate via HTTP than SOAP-based services and do not require XML messages or WSDL service-API definitions. for REST no middleware is required only HTTP support is needed.WADL Standard, REST can return XML, plain text, JSON, HTML etc

t is easier for many types of clients to consume RESTful web services while enabling the server side to evolve and scale. Clients can choose to consume some or all aspects of the service and mash it up with other web-based services.

REST uses standard HTTP so it is simplerto creating clients, developing APIs 2.REST permits many different data formats like XML, plain text, JSON, HTML where as SOAP only permits XML.
REST has better performance and scalability.
Rest and can be cached and SOAP can't 5.Built-in error handling where SOAP has No error handling
REST is particularly useful PDA and other mobile devices.

REST is services are easy to integrate with existing websites.

SOAP has set of protocols, which provide standards for security and reliability, among other things, and interoperate with other WS conforming clients and servers. SOAP Web services (such as JAX-WS) are useful in handling asynchronous processing and invocation.

For Complex API's SOAP will be more usefull.

Answer 4

One factor is that RPC communications are often not cached as part of the HTTP stack because the caching middleware shouldn't need to understand the contents of the request. So, RESTful systems can take better advantage of caching.