What’s the difference: SOAP architecture vs. RESTful architecture

Here’s how they differ:

• REST is a set of guidelines and principles for building web services. Lightweight, scalable, and commonly used for web apps and mobile backend development.

• SOAP is a protocol that defines a standardized format for exchanging information between web services, using XML as the messaging format. More heavyweight, feature-rich, and better suited for enterprise-level applications with complex requirements.

SOAP

• SOAP is a protocol that relies on response-request communications to exchange data and usually contains additional metadata like headers that describe the message structure, security aspects, and more. SOAP is inherently stateful, meaning the client and server must maintain a session state to complete an interaction.

• SOAP APIs use the web services description language (WSDL). SOAP can be used over various transport protocols, such as HTML or JMS. It supports different data formats, including XML, JSON, and binary.

RESTful

• RESTful is an architectural style known for its simplicity, scalability, and use of existing web standards. It uses a stateless client-server communication model, meaning that each client-server request is self-contained, and contains all the information the server needs to process the request. Commonly uses JSON as the data format, but can also support other preferred formats, such as XML

• RESTful APIs are stateless, meaning that each request is independent, and the server does not maintain any client-specific information between requests. Often described using standards like OpenAPI, or documentation that outlines the endpoints, operations, and communication requests. They typically use the HTTP transport protocol.