In this article, we will discuss some points that provide the difference between SOAP versus RESTful microservices. Before this article, we have discussed the Software architecture patterns and design, and also we have discussed how to decompose an application to the Microservices architecture based application.
Let’s start this article with the following diagram, that provides a lot of description about the differences:
The preceding diagram explains that SOA service based applications are compromised of more loosely coupled components that use an Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) messaging protocol to communicate between themselves.
But the Microservices based applications are a number of independent application services delivering one single functionality in a loosely connected and self-contained fashion, communicating through light-weight messaging protocols such as HTTP REST or Thrift API.
SOAP and RESTful microservices have the following differences:
| SOAP | RESTful microservices |
| An XML-based message protocol. | An architectural style. |
| Uses WSDL for communication between the consumer and the provider. | Use XML or JSON to send and receive data. |
| Invokes services by calling the RPC method. | Simply call services via the URL path. |
| The transfer is over HTTP. Also uses other protocols, such as SMTP or FTP. | The transfer is over HTTP only. |
| SOAP-based reads can’t be cached. | RESTful microservice reads can be cached. |
| SOAP is not very scalable. | RESTful microservices are very scalable. |
| SOAP is more suitable for enterprise systems and high-security systems, such as a banking system. | RESTful microservices are suitable for all types of systems apart from where high security and high reliability is critical. |
| Doesn’t support error handling. | Has built-in error handling. |
| Uses service interfaces to expose the business logic. | Uses URI to expose business logic. |
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