
LU2, 3270, and HLLAPI were nothing more then what was called at that time SCREEN SCRPERS (I had to leave the 'A' out because the site complained about the word R*PE in it). Getting OLD! Never the less the API library I implemented for IBM was call HLLAPI for IBM's old RS6000 UNIX workstation called of course AIX. Some how or another my message from the last one got sent before I finished it. I implemented the functional library for HLLAPI for IBM'S Elemenets of the screen could be found or written to based on rows and columns and pattern matching. Because it was an an old text based screen, everything was based on rows and columns of a two dimensional presentation space. It was all accessible and the fields were writeable, and the static or fixed data was readable. It contained presentation data based on what fields were on the menu screen and what data was fixed or static. Well they also had what was known as LU2 which was based on what was known as a 3270 presentation space payload that was functionally similar to an HTTP payload. IBM of course created LU6.2 which was a peer to peer protocol that enabled data to be transferred a client application and a mainframe application say in CICS.
#Rest vs soap software
Because the applications had no public API's only menu driven UI's there was the critical need to integrate with these dinosaur applications (and of course there still is for those of you that think the entire software universe is the content within an HTTP payload).
#Rest vs soap how to
We were attempting to figure out how to integrate Unix with the Mainframe with all it's different OS's (VM, MVS, CICS, etc). I'm an old timer the cut my teeth in programming during the old C and C++ days. As the Bible says "There is nothing new under the sun". Like this? Follow me ↯ Tweet Follow are constantly changing but things somehow remain the same. This developer agility I think led to REST being the winner here over time. In the end I think SOAP was just too verbose and slow, REST was something that developers didn't need a library to consume and parse, while if you used SOAP you would not attempt to write a raw implementation from scratch. Things like the popularity of things like Ruby on Rails put a fire under REST (by making it really easy to create REST api's).

#Rest vs soap update
Which ever architecture you choose make sure its easy for developers to access it, and well documented.Īn Update in 2020: When this article was written fifteen years ago, SOAP still had a strong base of support, though it was quickly loosing ground to REST. On the converse, Amazon's REST web service can sometimes be tricky to parse because it can be highly nested, and the result schema can vary quite a bit based on what you search for. For instance Google's AdWords web service is really hard to consume (in CF anyways), it uses SOAP headers, and a number of other things that make it kind of difficult. Rigid - type checking, adheres to a contractįor consuming web services, its sometimes a toss up between which is easier.Lightweight - not a lot of extra xml markup.The main advantages of REST web services are: So REST is definitely the trendy way to create a web service, if creating web services could ever be trendy (lets face it you use soap to wash, and you rest when your tired).

You will find SOAP web services in lots of enterprise software as well.Īs you may have noticed the companies I mentioned that are using REST api's haven't been around for very long, and their apis came out this year mostly. Google seams to be consistent in implementing their web services to use SOAP, with the exception of Blogger, which uses XML-RPC. You can get the contents of that object using an HTTP GET, to delete it, you then might use a POST, PUT, or DELETE to modify the object (in practice most of the services use a POST for this).Īll of Yahoo's web services use REST, including Flickr, API uses it, pubsub, bloglines, technorati, and both eBay, and Amazon have web services for both REST and SOAP. The acronym REST stands for Representational State Transfer, this basically means that each unique URL is a representation of some object. Lets step back a second and explain what REST is. I am seeing a lot of new web services are implemented using a REST style architecture these days rather than a SOAP one.
