SOAP Vs REST top differences you need to know

What is SOAP?

SOAP is based on a document encoding standard known as Extensible Markup Language (XML, for short), and the SOAP service is defined in such a way that users can then leverage XML no matter what the underlying communication network is.

For this system to work, though, the data transferred by SOAP (commonly referred to as the payload) also needs to be in XML format.

Notice a pattern here?

The push to be comprehensive and flexible (or, to be all things to all people) plus the XML payload requirement meant that SOAP ended up being quite complex, making it a lot of work to use properly. As you might guess, many IT people found SOAP daunting and, consequently, resisted using it.

About a decade ago, a doctoral student defined another web services approach as part of his thesis:

REST

Representational State Transfer, which is far less comprehensive than SOAP, aspires to solve fewer problems. It doesn't address some aspects of SOAP that seemed important but that, in retrospect, made it more complex to use — security, for example. 

The most important aspect of REST is that it's designed to integrate with standard web protocols so that REST services can be called with standard web verbs and URLs. For example, a valid REST call looks like this:

Related:

• Most frequently used UNIX sed commands