Information exchange among internal and/or external systems is an essential part of an organization’s IT division. To achieve these integrations, one can use Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs instead of using traditional file transfers.
So, what are REST APIs?
REST being an architectural style, takes a resource-based approach to web-based interactions. With REST, you locate a resource on the server, and you can either update that resource, delete it or get more information about it.
RESTful services are lightweight web services for the transfer of representation of resources through requests and responses.
RESTful services utilize the primary or most-commonly-used HTTP methods POST, GET, PUT and DELETE. These correspond to create, read, update, and delete (or CRUD) operations, respectively. (There are several other less frequently used verbs, too.)
REST APIs use the Status-Line part of the HTTP response message to notify a REST client of their request’s result. Each response to a request provides an HTTP status code. 2xx codes indicate success, while 4xx and 5xx codes denote client or server errors.
How does REST compare with SOAP
REST being an architectural style, takes a resource-based approach to web-based interactions. With REST, you locate a resource on the server, and you can either update that resource, delete it or get more information about it. REST is simple, scalable and optimized for web REST is data driven. REST allows many data formats such as XML, JSON, plain text, HTML
As SOAP is a protocol, the client doesn't choose to interact directly with a resource, but instead calls a service and that service moderates the access to the various objects and resources behind the scenes. SOAP is a much complex in structure than REST SOAP is function driven. SOAP only allows XML SOAP has tighter security as WS-Security is a built-in in addition to SSL support