What's Your Web Service Protocol Of Choice?
I have been doing a lot of web service development at work lately. I completed a FedEx integration for WorkXpress and have been working on a new integration with Drupal. Each of these integrations have involved using both SOAP servers and clients (the client being WorkXpress).
This has led me on a quest to learn more about web services. While I'm experienced with SOAP and WSDL, I really don't know much about the underlying architecture. I also know very little about other web service protocols (such as REST and XML-RPC). I found a really good article at http://michaeldehaan.net/2008/07/17/xmlrpc-vs-rest-vs-soap-vs-all-your-rpc-options/ which highlights the pros and cons of different protocols.
Having read all this, I'm still not sure what the current preference is. Specifically with web developers, but I would like to hear from everyone. So, what's your web service protocol of choice?
Comments
Restful web services are the future, all other services are something made on top of HTTP unnecessarily when we already have a web services protocol (HTTP), basically restful web services use the native HTTP verbs as "functions". The concept is that everything is a resource and every resource has a unique URL, then you use GET, POST, PUT and DELETE to perform actions on those resources using their urls to identify them. Also resources can have different presentations (HTML, XML, JSON, etc).
Read this: http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife
is a very good and simple explanation of what REST is all about.
That was an interesting read. Since I wrote this article, I have done more work with SOAP and a lot of work with REST. I have a pretty good understanding of REST and it has become my preference over SOAP.
James I. Armes
Web Applications Developer
http://www.jamesarmes.net