Difference between REST & SOAP...!!!

Difference between REST and SOAP 

#	SOAP	REST
1.	XML based message protocol	Architectural style Protocol
2.	Uses WSDL for Communication	Uses XML or JSON
3.	Transport Independent ***Since SOAP messages are wrapped inside a SOAP envelop it can be sent over to any transport mechanism e.g. TCP, FTP, SMTP or any other protocol	Transport Dependent ***RESTful web services are heavily dependent upon HTTP protocol.
4.	SOAP web service can return response with only XML	RESTful web service can return response in various format e.g. JSON, XML and HTML
5.	Difficult to call from Javascript	Easy to call from JavaScript
6.	SOAP messages consumes more bandwidth ***Because SOAP has additional header for every message & XML is more verbose than JSON	Rest consumes less bandwidth *** Because RESTFul services utilizes HTTP header.
7.	SOAP web services totally ignore web caching mechanism.	RESTful web service take full advantage of web caching mechanism because they are basically URL based
8.	Security in SOAP based web services need additional infrastructure in web to enable message or transport level security concerns.	Security in RESTful web service can be implemented using standard and traditional solutions for authorised access to certain web resources
9.	SOAP Stands for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).	REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer (REST)

***Jain