Web Services
‘Web services’ is the name given to a technology for providing loosely coupled and interoperable communications between computer systems over a network. Applications of this technology include enterprise application integration, enabling communications between distributed systems and interoperability with partners or other businesses. The major benefits of using web services are platform independence, flexibility and ease of maintenance, which are the result of the open standards employed and the simplified underlying request-response concept that avoids the complexity of other distributed technologies such as CORBA.
Web services communications are primarily XML-based and essentially provide the ability to make RPC-like function calls between remote systems, regardless of their underlying platform. Specifically, SOAP over HTTP is the most common implementation of a web service. Supporting protocols such as UDDI [OASIS 1] and WSDL [W3C 1] provide discovery and description services that contain enough information for client applications to be built to utilise the service.
The ability to expose functionality through HTTP provides the benefit of minimal firewall configuration but also has the effect of circumventing firewall rules that may restrict unauthorised access to these functions. The addition of UDDI and WSDL allow remote users to easily locate and use the functionality provided. This exposure poses a far greater threat than was present in the previous generation of distributed technologies that typically used proprietary binary encoding schemes and restrictive firewall rule sets to limit access.
Web services communication is based upon the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). SOAP is an XML-based information packaging definition which can be used for exchanging structured and typed information between peers in a distributed environment, relying on Internet transport protocols such as HTTP. Because SOAP is standards based, it also provides interoperability in heterogeneous environments.
The most relevant documents are
“SOAP Version 1.2 Part 0: Primer” [W3C 2]
“SOAP Version 1.2 Part 1: Messaging Framework” [W3C 3]
“SOAP Version 1.2 Part 2: Adjuncts” [W3C 4].
Read MoreWhat is the difference between HTTP and REST and SOAP in web services?
SOAP uses WSDL for communication between consumer and provider, whereas REST just uses XML or JSON to send and receive data
WSDL Defines contract between client and service and is static by its nature. In case of REST contract is somewhat complicated and is defined by HTTP, URI, Media Formats and Application Specific Coordination Protocol. It’s highly dynamic unlike WSDL.
This is not true. Plain XML or JSON are not RESTful at all. None of them define any controls(i.e. links and link relations, method information, encoding information etc…) which is against REST as far as messages must be self contained and coordinate interaction between agent/client and service.
With links + semantic link relations clients should be able to determine what is next interaction step and follow these links and continue communication with service.
It is not necessary that messages be human readable, it’s possible to use cryptic format and build perfectly valid REST applications. It doesn’t matter whether message is human readable or not.
Thus, plain XML(application/xml) or JSON(application/json) are not sufficient formats for building REST applications. It’s always reasonable to use subset of these generic media types which have strong semantic meaning and offer enough control information(links etc…) to coordinate interactions between client and server.
REST is over only HTTP. HTTP is most widely used and when we talk about REST web services we just assume HTTP. HTTP defines interface with it’s methods(GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH etc) and various headers which can be used uniformly for interacting with resources. This uniformity can be achieved with other protocols as well.
REST permits many different data formats where as SOAP only permits XML.
While this may seem like it adds complexity to REST because you need to handle multiple formats, in my experience it has actually been quite beneficial. JSON usually is a better fit for data and parses much faster. REST allows better support for browser clients due to it’s support for JSON.
HTTP is an application protocol. REST is a set of rules, that when followed, enable you to build a distributed application that has a specific set of desirable constraints.
If you are looking for the most significant constraints of REST that distinguish a RESTful application from just any HTTP application, I would say the “self-description” constraint and the hypermedia constraint (aka Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (HATEOAS)) are the most important.
The self-description constraint requires a RESTful request to be completely self descriptive in the users intent. This allows intermediaries (proxies and caches) to act on the message safely.
The HATEOAS constraint is about turning your application into a web of links where the client’s current state is based on its place in that web. It is a tricky concept and requires more time to explain than I have right now.