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The words “web services” mean many things to people with different fields. For general users, it is about using online services, like surfing the internet, but for developers and webmasters, it has different meanings. Overall it is a broad term that tells us how the communication between two different sets of devices or applications held over the World Wide Web (WWW).
This communication system can be categorized into two types, namely Simple Object Access Protocol or SOAP, and Representational State Transfer or REST.
Quite often both are considered to be the terms with same meanings but the how both works and what tools both use for communication purposes creates the fine line between two. Before highlighting the differences between two, it merits to discuss what both actually are.
What Is a REST API?
REST is basically an architectural style of the web services that work as a channel of communication between different computers or systems on the internet. The term REST API is something else.
Those application programming interfaces that are backed by the architectural style of REST architectural system are called REST APIs. REST API compliant web services, database systems, and computer systems permit requesting systems to get robust access and redefine representations of web based resources by deploying a predefined set of stateless protocols and standard operations.
By these protocols and operations and redeploying the manageable and updatable components without causing the effect on the system, REST API systems deliver fast performance, reliability, and more progression.
What Is a SOAP API?
SOAP is a standard communication protocol system that permits processes using different operating systems like Linux and Windows to communicate via HTTP and its XML. SOAP based APIs are designed to create, recover, update and delete records like accounts, passwords, leads, and custom objects.
These offers over twenty different kinds of calls that make it easy for the API developers to maintain their accounts, perform accurate searches and much more. These can then be used with all those languages that support web services.
SOAP APIs take the advantages of making web based protocols such as HTTP and its XML that are already operating the all operating systems that are why its developers can easily manipulate web services and get responses without caring about language and platforms at all.
Following are the important differences between REST API and SOAP API.
| Sr. No. | Key | REST API | SOAP API |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Implementation | Rest API is implemented as it has no official standard at all because it is an architectural style. | On other hand SOAP API has an official standard because it is a protocol. |
| 2 | Internal communication | REST APIs uses multiple standards like HTTP, JSON, URL, and XML for data communication and transfer. | SOAP APIs is largely based and uses only HTTP and XML. |
| 3 | Resource requirement | As REST API deploys and uses multiple standards as stated above, so it takes fewer resources and bandwidth as compared to SOAP API. | On other hand Soap API requires more resource and bandwidth as it needs to convert the data in XML which increases its payload and results in the large sized file. |
| 4 | Description | REST API uses Web Application Description Language for describing the functionalities being offered by web services. | On other hand SOAP API used Web Services Description language for the same. |
| 5 | Security | REST has SSL and HTTPS for security. | On other hand SOAP has SSL( Secure Socket Layer) and WS-security due to which in the cases like Bank Account Password, Card Number, etc. SOAP is preferred over REST. |
| 6 | Abbreviation | REST stands for Representational State Transfer. | On other hand SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol |
| 7 | Interchange | REST can make use of SOAP as the underlying protocol for web services, because in the end it is just an architectural pattern. | On other hand SOAP cannot make use of REST since SOAP is a protocol and REST is an architectural pattern. |
