Comparative study of web service technologies

Abstract

With Web Services being in very wide use in modern cloud driven services, the various competing technologies each have their strengths and weaknesses. This dissertation analyses Web Services from different angles, specifically those implementing the popular SOAP and REST protocols. Although SOAP has been around before REST was, the crave for a more efficient and lightweight protocol motivated the invention of REST. The main motivation behind this research is to identify how the different technologies compare in terms of efficiency, security and complexity of development in particular. From the results obtained and evaluations conducted, SOAP and REST are optimised for different scenarios, which make use of the various levels of efficiency, bandwidth efficiency, security and complexity of development. The implementations of both technologies in different development environments and underlying frameworks also affect these aspects. This research looks into the differences between the two most widely used programming technologies, Java and .Net. The various encoding mechanisms used are also separately evaluated in order to identify potential shortcomings as well as strongholds. From the studies and tests performed, .Net has emerged as the preferred development platform, being more user friendly to use, resulting in significantly shorter time being used to develop the same thing as opposed to Java. SOAP has proven to be more feature rich and standardised than REST. The approach used in this research is a combination of literature reviews together with specification analysis in order to identify the various capabilities of each technology. These are complemented by real life tests using readily available components in order to evaluate the development experience and outcomes compared to what the specifications would suggest.