Short answer, REST. Don’t make your engineers and clients suffer by making them deal with SOAP/XML/WSDLs (Who doesn’t love acronyms?). You don’t want them to curse you, so make their lives easier. I know the idea of soap is clean and refreshing, but nothing in dealing with SOAP makes me feel clean or refreshed, only dirty and exhausted. And yes, this topic has been widely covered, but Cloud Elements prides itself on being the lynchpin of APIs so I figured we should probably have a post on this topic. Don’t you feel lucky?
Let’s start with SOAP. I’ll keep this as unbiased as possible, but if you’ve read my other posts, you’ll know that will last about 30 seconds. SOAP stands for Simple (HA!) Object Access Protocol. Its format is that of XML, which resembles that of HTML tags, *gag*. Well, I tried to keep it unbiased, but that didn’t last long at all. SOAP was developed back in the 90’s and thus is used in many legacy APIs. It is a stateful operation and is awesome if you care about all the changes to a given object, not just that it changed. Who doesn’t love all the data? Your ISP and the host server. That amount of detail can decimate your bandwidth. SOAP is a standard as well. Meaning that there are rules to follow. Whereas REST is a set of guidelines left to be interpreted by the given engineer. https://goo.gl/MJCjLW #DataIntegration #ML
