What are the factors that help to decide which style of Web services - SOAP or REST - to use?

Question

What are the factors that help to decide which style of Web services - SOAP or REST - to use?

Answer

Generally, REST is preferred due to its simplicity, performance, scalability, and support for multiple data formats. However, SOAP is favorable to use where service requires an advanced level of security and transactional reliability. But you can read the following facts before opting for any of the styles. Does the service expose data or business logic? REST is commonly used for exposing data while SOAP for logic. The requirement from clients or providers for a formal contract. SOAP can provide contract via WSDL. Support multiple data formats. Support for AJAX calls. REST can apply the XMLHttpRequest. Synchronous and asynchronous calls. SOAP enables both synchronous/ asynchronous operations whereas REST has built-in support for synchronous. Stateless or Stateful calls. REST is suited for stateless operations. Security. SOAP provides a high level of security. Transaction support. SOAP is good at transaction management. Limited bandwidth. SOAP has a lot of overhead when sending/receiving packets since it’s XML based, requires a SOAP header. However, REST requires less bandwidth to send requests to the server. Its messages are mostly built using JSON. Ease of use. REST based application is easy to implement, test, and maintain. Ready to succeed in your next Web API Testing interview API testing interview questions can be unlimited regarding of the number of questions and area covered. Although the above answers might not fully be used in your interview, we do hope it somehow provides the solid understanding on Web API testing and gets you ready for the upcoming job and project related to API testing. Wish you confidence and luck in your testing career! If you have any suggestions on this topic, please do not hesitate to add to here. We look forward to a better and more adequate list to all testers.