SOREST, A Novel Framework Combining SOAP and REST for Implementing Web Services

The two leading technologies being used to implement Web services are SOAP and REST. SOAP-based services have been widely used for interfacing software applications within and across boundaries of organisations. However, lately the idea behind REST has been extensively investigated for creating Web services and it is becoming a challenge to the adoption of SOAP as the technology of choice for implementing Web services. Therefore, it has become imperative to investigate and compare the effectiveness of the two types of implementations in terms of their relative performance. This will help developers and researches in making the right choice of technology for implementing the required functionalities through web services. Also, by analysing the two approaches, it can be investigated whether and how the best features of the two can be combined to provide a more useful and improved way of implementing web services. Finally, a novel approach to implementing web services, named SOREST has been proposed which improved the performance of SOAP-based web services while at the same time making use of the benefits of both SOAP and REST.