[thephatp]

Can anyone explain the true advantages/disadvantages between REST and SOAP? It seems that both give you quite a bit of flexibility, but that SOAP has extended functionality. However, I've heard that using a RESTful interface is more intuitive than SOAP. What about WRT security? Can anyone recommend a good book?

[drhowarddrfine]

REST is available on all systems everywhere while SOAP needs a definition somewhere that everyone can agree on. REST is HTTP and those who know HTTP, know REST, or at least can understand the concept.
RESTful Web Services

[thephatp]

drhowarddrfine, on 17 August 2010 - 01:25 PM, said:

REST is available on all systems everywhere while SOAP needs a definition somewhere that everyone can agree on. REST is HTTP and those who know HTTP, know REST, or at least can understand the concept.
RESTful Web Services

Thanks for the link. I'll check out the orielly book. I'm somewhat concerned with security, in that sniffers could pick up information from the link. Not sure how much I need to worry about that with my project at this point, but it may be of concern in the future. Since it's HTTP, there's no way to encrypt the url, at least I'm assuming.

Thanks again!

[drhowarddrfine]

The first rule of REST is no one talks about encrypting anything in the URI. Each URI is a pointer to the page and is no different than how anything is used today so security is no different. In fact, nothing is different and is the same as it was since the RFC was generated. If security is a concern then it's a concern with/without REST.