In today's post, I want to briefly discuss the differences between SOAP and REST based services.
SOAP follows a convention where the data is exchanged as messages and the operations are usually methods on objects. Data can be exchanged in both text and binary. It needs specific tools to inspect the messages.
REST is a lightweight protocol in that it describes resources and operations as a set of predefined verbs usually HTTP verbs. Instead of a big XML format, it can use JSON format. Data can be intercepted by standard http traffic tools such as Fiddler.