From the course: Programming Foundations: APIs and Web Services

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

History and future of SOAP

History and future of SOAP

From the course: Programming Foundations: APIs and Web Services

Start my 1-month free trial

History and future of SOAP

- Having looked at restful APIs and all the wonderful advantages they bring, you might wonder why would anyone want to use anything else. There's an ongoing debate with REST versus SOAP which creates some questioning about the future of SOAP. REST is like a postcard, very lightweight, no ceiling or opening required to read the message. And SOAP is like using an envelope. You have to fold the letter and seal it. And it has to be opened in order to read the message. SOAP has extra overhead, more bandwidth required. REST and restful APIs have gained popularity over SOAP and more support is found towards restful APIs. Its simplicity with verb like operations make it friendly to both the developer and consumer. It's compatible with most formats and it's easy to use. The rise of the cloud and cloud native APIs may even drive more usage to REST APIs as a lot of cloud based services expose APIs that are only accessible via REST with limited support for SOAP. So again, why look at any…

Contents