I’m trying to figure out wether I should use SOAP or REST for a specific project. I will explain what the project is or needs to do, and I hope some of you will give me useful information about why I should use one over the other.
The project I need to work on is totally web service based. Every frond end implementation needs to access webservices to get all the information it needs. But Beyond that, we also have an Indesign plugin that talks to these webservices to upload documents and check validations on the document etc.
So to make it short, I need to access the web services via front end web gui’s and via an indesign plugin. The latter makes me wonder wether I should use REST or SOAP.
Thanks alot for reading this and posting you feedback.
I found this really great article on the advantages and disadvantages of SOAP vs REST: http://geeknizer.com/rest-vs-soap-using-http-choosing-the-right-webservice-protocol/
And my own humble opionion:
I don’t like SOAP, I never did. It’s been great at the time, but it just never felt “right”. If you’ve ever tried to read one of these huge overloaded XML-documents and compared it to the REST output (which is JSON most of the time) you know what I mean. IMHO just feels “better”.
One problem is that you have to document your REST API better, but that shouldn’t be that big problem as long as it is not open to everyone.
Especially if you handle all your data with Webservices, I think you should go with the lighter and less bandwith consuming option: REST.
Also REST is the new and hip technology that everyone uses at the moment… 😉
About your indesign plugin: You should be able to include any library you want, so that shouldn’t be a problem.