Review of Web Services in .NET, outlining some of the differences between SOAP and REST

1. Or “How I learned to stop worrying
and love HTTP”

2. A service that is accessed using web-
standard methods
 HTTP
 Consumers of a web service don’t need to
know anything about the platform, object
model, or programming language used to
implement the service, they just need to
know how to HTTP

3.  Remote Procedure Call
• Basically calling the methods of an object located
on a server instead of in memory
• uses Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
 Standard used to represent method calls and return
values
 Uses Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) to
communicate what is expected for input and output

4. • Soap is kind of complicated
• Proxy class generators were created
• see: Add (Service) Reference

5.  Relies on event-driven message passing
for communication
 Other fancy words include “enterprise
service bus”, “event driven architecture”
 Almost all solutions are vendor-specific or
home-brewed, terribly expensive and
complicated
 I will not be showing an example of this
today :P

6. A service that doesn’t require any of the
SOAP stuff
 Data usually returned in XML or JSON
format
 Structured so that multiple web services
can be combined into single applications
“aka mashups”
 Resource focused as opposed to action
focused (nouns over verbs)

7.  aka REST
 Uses HTTP Verbs to perform actions with
resources
• Create = PUT, Read = GET, Update = POST (or
PATCH), Delete = DELETE
 Focus on stateless resources and clean
URLs
• i.e. server.com/customers/5/invoices instead of
server.com/customers?id=5&show=invoices

9.  HATEOAS
 Restafarianism
 OData