After learning basic aspects of API and its basic types, lets now move ahead to web service api’s which serve our main agenda of building and communicating two software’s.
So, what is basically a web service? Web service facilitates interaction between two software’s. It has an interface (API) which allows this connectivity. Keeping this in mind let’s make a statement that “All Web services are APIs but all APIs are not Web services”.
Getting it clear? Alright… Now we will learn the most important topic of API development, that is SOAP and REST. Starting with their full form, both can be stated as: SOAP – Simple Object Access Protocol
REST – REpresentational State Transfer
SOAP and REST are two different accessibilities to web service development.
SOAP is standard based web service access protocol which was designed before REST and came into the picture. The main idea behind designing SOAP was to ensure that programs built on different platforms and programming languages could exchange data easily.
A RESTful API, also referred to as a RESTful web service is based on representational state transfer (REST) technology, an architectural style and approach to communications often used in web service development.
Now the question arises how do these two different entities serve our purpose? Which is more efficient?Let’s explore this in next part of SOAP V/S REST API!
Till then, Stay tuned and Enjoy tech!
Shruti.A.M 