4/9/2020 Types of web services - Hands-On RESTful Web Services with Go - Second Edition

 Hands-On RESTful Web Services with Go - Second Edition

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Types of web services

There are many types of web services that have evolved over time. Some of the
more prominent ones are as follows:

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)

Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)

Web Services Description Language (WSDL)

Representational State Transfer (REST)

Out of these, SOAP became popular in the early 2000s, when XML riding on a
high wave. The XML data format is used by various distributed systems to
communicate with each other.

A SOAP request usually consists of these three basic components:

The envelope

The header

The body

Just to perform an HTTP request and response cycle, we have to attach a lot of
additional data in SOAP. A sample SOAP request to a fictional book
server, www.example.org, looks like this:

POST /Books HTTP/1.1

Host: www.example.org
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 299
SOAPAction: "https://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelop
<soap:Header>
</soap:Header>
<soap:Body>
<m:GetBook>
<m:BookName>Alice in the wonderland</m:BookName>
</m:GetBook>
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

This is a standard example of a SOAP request for getting book data. If we

observe carefully, it is in XML format, with special tags specifying the envelope
and body. Since XML works by defining a lot of namespaces, the response gets
bulky.

The main drawback of SOAP is that it is too complex for implementing web
services and is a heavyweight framework. A SOAP HTTP request can get very
bulky and can cause bandwidth wastage. The experts looked for a simple
alternative, and in came REST. In the next section, we will briefly discuss REST.

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