Abstract:
This paper presents a comparative performance evaluation of two Web service implementations: one is based on SOAP and the other on Representational State Transfer (REST). Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and REST-based development approaches handle service interactions quite differently. SOAP is a standardized framework for constructing and processing messages independent of the technological capabilities of the receiver and can work on top of a variety of application layer protocols such as RPC, HTTP, or SMTP, whereas, REST is a set of principles for designing Web applications (HTTP as the underlying protocol). We built SOAP and REST-based Web services that perform Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations on a database and retrieve local files. We utilized response time and throughput metrics to compare the performance of these Web services. We found that, on average, REST has better performance compared to SOAP, though not all results were statistically conclusive. As an ancillary outcome, we found that developing Web services using SOAP was easier, due to considerable tool support. However, developing Web services using REST was time consuming and difficult due to the necessity of in-depth knowledge of HTTP and rudimentary tool support.
Authors:
Pavan Kumar Potti
Sanjay Ahuja
Karthikeyan Umapathy
Zornitza Prodanoff
This paper was written based on Pavan Kumar's master thesis. I presented this paper at the CONISAR 2012 on November 2, 2012.
Here is the link for the presentation:
Here is the link for the article:
Here is the list of papers that won awards at CONISAR 2012: