Eng : AbduAlmalek Ali Mohammed Sholan Dep: SE

Difference between REST and SOAP web services

REST and SOAP are web service technologies for solving the message delivery problem.
The choice between the two is not clear and comparison is difficult. This thesis tries to do the
comparison and ease the choice with the recommendations. Also the aim of this work is to
research REST as a replacement for SOAP for Seitatech Payment solution.

The definitions of SOAP and REST and the usage of both is described. The definition
studies are used to do the comparison in a conceptual and feature level. In addition, practical
tests about the performance of each technologies is made. A simple test setup is created using
Seitatech provided web service platform. Afterwards, the test results are analysed.

The test results show REST to outperform SOAP in terms of bandwidth usage and
message processing performance. During the test cases, performance issues was discovered when
message size grows, which indicates parser issues in Seitatech platform.

The comparison provided results of characteristic differences between SOAP and REST.
The recommendation of REST is made in most common cases, as it is less complex, less
burdening and easier to develop and use than SOAP. SOAP should only be chosen if particular
functionality, such as security options, is required.