Many developers will be surprised to learn that SOAP isn't the only game in town for Web services interfacing. REST offers a perfectly good solution for the majority of implementations, with greater flexibility and lower overhead. Developers need to stop reaching immediately for SOAP and start choosing the right technology for the application.
by Amit Asaravala
October 21, 2002
or the past two years, the hype surrounding the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) has barely waned, although its opponents have gradually risen in number. While some critics are simply tired of hearing about Web services, a small handful of Internet architects have come up with a surprisingly good argument for pushing SOAP aside: there's a better method for building Web services in the form of Representational State Transfer (REST).
REST is more an old philosophy than a new technology. Whereas SOAP looks to jump-start the next phase of Internet development with a host of new specifications, the REST philosophy espouses that the existing principles and protocols of the Web are enough to create robust Web services. This means that developers who understand HTTP and XML can start building Web services right away, without needing any toolkits beyond what they normally use for Internet application development.
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Amit Asaravala is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of Web Techniques magazine and founding editor of New Architect magazine. Reach him at amit@asaravala.com.
or the past two years, the hype surrounding the Simple Object Access Protocol (
Amit Asaravala is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of Web Techniques magazine and founding editor of New Architect magazine. Reach him at 
