[PJUG Javamail] SOAP or REST?

[Brian Mason]

I have been out of the web service market for about 3 years, but if I
remember right, WSDL was a pretty BAD interface definition format.
There were 4 different variations on calling convention and parameter
packaging and you had to get the right combination to support the
expensive tools.  I think there was one combination that would work
for .net and the WSDL compiler from JEE.
Is this still the case?

Brian.

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:07 PM, Howard Abrams <howard.abrams at gmail.com> wrote:
> Let me add my 3 cents.
>
> Web services is all about loosely coupling services/components, and
> the *interface* really depends on your customer's demands.
>
> I've found that the biggest advantage of SOAP is the tool automation
> and the maturity in that arena. Once you have built your WSDL (the
> equivalent REST version isn't done yet), other tools can look at it
> and easily connect to it. However, as has been already mentioned,
> these tools are typically in the "Enterprise" space, and come with
> "Enterprise" price tags. If you have Enterprise clients as your
> customer, you may want to choose SOAP.
>
> Since RESTful interfaces are easier to *program* against, most
> programmers will prefer REST over SOAP. REST generally makes the most
> sense when you can control both the client and the server.
>
>
> On Mar 18, 2009, at 7:17 PM, Nimret Sandhu wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday 18 March 2009 04:31:53 pm Bill Jackson wrote:
>>> Yes, absolutely.  (I have never used these words before, but please
>>> remember this is my opinion and not necessarily my employer's.)
>>> REST is
>>> self-contained, dead simple to use, and its descriptive URLs are a
>>> thing of
>>> beauty; IMHO, it is a no-brainer in cases where the complexity and
>>> overhead
>>> of SOAP make no sense.
>>
>> to elaborate on the 'descriptive URLs' observation here, REST
>> provides a more
>> OO style RPC api while SOAP is more of a flat procedural style RPC
>> interface.
>> Eg: http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html
>>
>> REST uses HTTP specifically while SOAP is supposed to be protocol
>> agnostic (
>> eg SOAP over SMTP).
>>
>> SOAP is also more of an enterprise industry 'standard' so you may
>> find more
>> support for it in enterprise products which you might want to be
>> interoperable with or provide interoperability for. REST appears to
>> be more
>> prevalent in the world wild web ( pun intended :) and not so much
>> within
>> products per se.
>>
>> SOAP is built on top of XML ( request + response) while REST
>> responses can be
>> XML, JSON, binary data, whatever. Yeah, SOAP can also return those
>> data types
>> but you have the additional overhead of binding those to XML (
>> de+serialization).
>>
>> As someone already recommended, I used ApacheCXF at my last job to
>> implement
>> both a SOAP and a REST interface. I used the JAX-WS spec to create the
>> services which should allow switchable implementations with deployment
>> changes only ( theoretically :)
>>
>> Note that a browser fetching resources from the World Wild Web is an
>> example
>> of RESTful architecture.
>>
>> regards -
>> --
>> Nimret Sandhu
>> http://www.nimret.com
>> http://www.nimsoft.biz
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