▲ 3 points

Ask HN: Are people still developing new SOAP APIs?

by abhas9·9y ago·1 comments·view on hn ↗

Last I encountered a SOAP based service was during my internship in a financial firm in 2013. That was the time when I started my career in IT. I remember having some study material about SOAP in one of my engineering course. Outside of that, I haven't used SOAP much during my career.

I am asking this since the question of "Difference between SOAP and REST" came in one of my recent interviews. From what I know (and what I found on Google) SOAP is a protocol with tight coupling between client and server for information interchange which is closely related to business logic. Whereas REST is more flexible stateless architecture for data transfer.

Can someone please correct me if I am wrong about this difference between SOAP and REST? Also, what is the present-day significance of SOAP?

SOAP became very slippery and got washed down the drain.

Seriously, SOAP is based on a number of rather heavy-weight standards: WS-*. In recent times, I have only seen it used in the context of Java based systems running on enterprise frameworks. Given the choice, I much rather use REST with JSON (instead of XML and its baggage).