Restful advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:

1> simple

2> go through firewall

3> without discovery and registry

disadavantes:

1> no way for lagre data and complex data structure

2> no standard for producer and consuerm like SOAP

4.6Advantages

RESTful has some aspects which can be viewed as positive,including the following

[Pau08]:

_ RESTful Web services appear to be simplebecause REST applies many existing

well-known standards (HTTP, XML, URI, and MIME) and needonly infrastructure

that has already become ordinary.

_ HTTP clients and servers are compatible withall programming languages and

operating system/hardware platforms, and the default HTTPport 80 is usually left

open by default in most firewall configurations.

_ Only a small effort is needed to build aclient of a Restful service. Services can

be tested using simply a mere web browser and thedevelopment of client

software becomes superfluous.

_ REST allows discovering Web resources withoutany discovery or registry

repository.

 

 

4.7 Disadvantages

RESTful has also some aspects which can beviewed as negative, including the

following [Pau08]:

_ Encoding alarge amount of input data in the resource URI is impossible because

the server either refuses such requests orcrashes

_ It may alsobe challenging to encode complex data structures into URI as there is

no commonly accepted marshalling mechanism.Inherently, the POST method

does not suffer from such limitations.

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_ Unlike SOAP-basedweb services, which have a standard vocabulary to describe

the web service interface through WSDL,Restful web services currently have no

such grammar. Both the service consumer andservice producer must have an outof-

band agreement. Services can be describedusing Web Application Description

Language (WADL). It is an XML-based fileformat that provides a machinereadable

description of REST web services. WADL is notyet widely supported.

_ WhileSOAP-based web services support a standard vocabulary to define the web

service interface by using WSDL, Restful webservices at present do not define

such grammar. An agreement has to beestablished between the service consumer

and service producer.