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A SOAP service has been used in my web application. In my web application, each and every request-response process is done via SOAP service. As i said, there is extensive use of SOAP.Very Complex structures are defined in WSDL. More importantly, we have two different teams for SOAP service development: one for web service client and other for server.

Now, my team is thinking of moving from SOAP to REST as they think that SOAP is a very heavy. It will be beneficial to move on REST as it is light weight.

Being not having small chunk of bytes like in SOAP header makes REST lighter?

Please suggest do we really need to move onto REST. Will it be beneficial in our scenario?

Thanks in advance!!

Infotechie
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As a consumer of many web services I prefer a good rest service over SOAP. Strongly recommend reading this: http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html

Is REST lighter than SOAP? Well a little. But its typically not the main driver of using one over the other. One caveat there being the ability to implement a better read cache solution when using REST.

Other considerations... transport of binary data and WS-Security substitutes if required.

REST has the momentum. More companies are using it and shops like Mashery even have branding all about 'dropping the soap'.

ficuscr
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  • :Thanks for the input. Can you please provide any example of how REST provides better read cache solution? – Infotechie Oct 05 '12 at 16:51
  • Describes it very well: http://odino.org/rest-better-http-cache/ Leverage that its just HTTP. – ficuscr Oct 05 '12 at 17:00
  • Also perhaps of interest: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/106546/performance-of-soap-vs-xml-rpc-or-rest – ficuscr Oct 05 '12 at 17:07
  • REST is also "lighter" from a client implementation point of view. Usually you start by doing a HTTP GET and go from there. Implementing an initial SOAP client however requires a lot more work. – Tom Howard Oct 07 '12 at 14:23