RESTFul SOAP Stéphane Nyombayire WHIM April 10, 2007

Architectural Strengths Attribute Resource-orientedService-oriented CategoryResource instancesServices instances Main FocusRequest addressing (usually URLs) Creation of request payloads Addressing / Request routing A resource has a unique address One endpoint address per service Cacheable?YesNo Application interface Generic to the request mechanism Specific to this service– description is protocol specific (e.g.WSDL) Payload / data format description No – nothing directly linked to address / URL Yes – part of service description (e.g. XML Schema in WSDL)

Best of both Worlds? SOAP gets some REST Conformal methods/addressing Caching (performance) HTTP resource model REST’s SOAPing XML Structured Headers Mandatory headers SOAP Encoding Extensions

REST + XML

REST + XML (2)

SOAP 1.2 Set of resources describes the system Assemble logical URIs to represent resources Define schemas for resource representations Enable discoverability of resources Provide appropriate resource manipulation operations

Example

Example (cont’d)

Issues: Scalability issues with URI based resource dispatch Dynamic configuration for client proxy URIs Dependency on HTTP SOAP extensibility model

Summary SOAP benefits from wide range industry support REST describes the WEB Which one? REST + SOAP is possible SOAP 1.2 Issues

References Roy T. Fielding: Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software ArchitecturesArchitectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures Sam Ruby: REST + SOAPREST + SOAP Roger Costello: REST TutorialREST Tutorial W3C: Architectural Principles of the WWW WD, SOAP 1.2 WDArchitectural Principles of the WWW WDSOAP 1.2 WD Websites: RESTwiki, Xml.comRESTwikiXml.com