Question

Receiving and sending data with JSON is done with simple HTTP requests. Whereas in SOAP, we need to take care of a lot of things. Parsing XML is also, sometimes, hard. Even Facebook uses JSON in Graph API. I still wonder why one should still use SOAP? Is there any reason or area where SOAP is still a better option? (Despite the data format)

Also, in simple client-server apps (like Mobile apps connected with a server), can SOAP give any advantage over JSON?

I will be very thankful if someone can enlist the major/prominent differences between JSON and SOAP considering the information I have provided(If there are any).

Answer 1

I found the following on advantages of SOAP:

• There is one big reason everyone sticks with SOAP instead of using JSON. With every JSON setup, you’re always coming up with your own data structure for each project. I don’t mean how the data is encoded and passed, but how the data formatted format is defined, the data model.
• SOAP has an industry-mature way of specifying that data will be in a certain format: e.g. "Cart is a collection of Products and each Product can have these attributes, etc." A well put together WSDL document really has this nailed. See W3C specification: Web Services Description Language
• JSON has similar ways of specifying this data structure — a JavaScript class comes to mind as the most common way of doing this — but a JavaScript class isn’t really a data structure used for this purpose in any kind of agnostic, well established, widely used way.

In short, SOAP has a way of specifying the data structure in a maturely formatted document (WSDL). JSON doesn’t have a standard way of doing this.

If you are creating a client application and your server implementation is done with SOAP then you have to use SOAP in client side.

Also, see: Why use SOAP over JSON and custom data format in an “ENTERPRISE” application? [closed]