I am exploring Restlet for my next project. One of the requirements is to communicate with a legacy SOAP-based service. What is the best practice to provide RESTful style to clients, but communicate via SOAP to this back-end server?
Restlet is offering a complete HTTP client API, so even if your backend is a SOAP server, you can still communicate with it.
Although Restlet doesn't include a usual SOAP stack, you can easily use FreeMarker/Velocity templates to send SOAP messages and XPath processing to extract valuable content from answers.
Related
Is SOAP designed to be a stateful? How can it be reached? SOAP use RPC, so where to store data?
Is REST designed to be a stateless? Is it possible to store data in JSON ? Is it so wrong?
Thanks
Is REST designed to be a stateless?
Yes, it really is -- but Fielding is precise about what stateless means in the context of REST:
communication must be stateless in nature, as in the client-stateless-server (CSS) style of Section 3.4.3 (Figure 5-3), such that each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Session state is therefore kept entirely on the client.
In other words, to correctly interpret a request, the server does not need to remember any previous requests.
For example, contrast HTTP (where credentials are part of the metadata of the request) with FTP (where credentials are sent separately from the RETR command).
Comparing SOAP with REST is not so suitable, because SOAP is a protocol based on XML and REST is an architectural style that is by definition not bringged to a specific technology.
In any case the common use of REST is via http, like SOAP, and the common usage of REST with json and http is only a comfortable implementation that is very suitable for web development and machine to machine communication due to the incredible good support for json in almost all the modern programming language.
Said that SOAP is definitely stateless!.
When we fire a web service call with soap we create a SOAP envelop in xml and send it on a http channel, that is stateless by default.
During the years near to SOAP many other protocols that can be used with SOAP can add some feature to the protocol the well known WS-*. BPEL deserves some discussion, it is the most important standard for SOAP orchestration.
Even if with BPEL in my experience the engine provide a SOAP web service in order to create a "state full" web service, the fact that a BPEL process is exposed via SOAP it is not correlated with SOAP. BPEL is BPEL and SOAP is SOAP are two separated things.
said that yes REST is an architectural style that is stateless by design and it is particular suitable and used with http, but even soap is a stateless protocol that use http like transportation layer.
for the storing data part of the question, storing data is a application concern. Of course you can pass data in a rest api like a SOAP web service. For the SOAP web service usually you will post data on the body of the SOAP envelop. In a REST service typically you are creating/updating a resource and for this reason using the classical http implementation of REST you will perform a POST(create)/PUT(update all the resource)/
PATCH(update only a piece of resource) pasing the data in the body of the http request. of course do not forget the Content-Type http header on application/json.
I hope that it can help you
I have a Soap web service deployed in one Application Server. We want to integrate that Soap Webservice with Apache Camel in another application server (JBoss Fuse) server. Are there some guidelines available?
What is the application server that hosts the webservice? What language/technology is the webservice coded in? What (broadly) will the Camel route do.
Camel provides a heap of different data input endpoints -- direct memory, HTTP, FTP, files, SOAP, etc., etc. Connecting your webservice to Camel comes down to choosing one of these that endpoints that your webservice can use. Camel offers a huge amount of flexibility in how it accepts and responds to data, and the choice of an approach really depends on the needs of your application, and how it is developed.
I am new to Rest web service and while learning it a question strikes me,
In SOAP based web service, WSDL is act as a contract between client and service provider, so, Client will know how to interact with service provider by reading the WSDL file and create a client which is highly capable of interacting with service provider. To my understanding, in Rest web service we don't have WSDL so how a client will generate its stub automatically?
In REST, clients are not generated automatically, in general. There is something called WADL, which is sort of "WSDL for REST", but it's not a standard yet and may never become a standard. But in general, all REST clients need to be created without the use of metadata from the service.
I want to use NeoLoad to perform load test on:
1. HTTP traffic
2. REST services
From the NeoLoad site I found that it supports HTTP and SOAP. Can anyone confirm me that using NeoLoad I can perform load testing for REST APIs.
Thank you for your interest in NeoLoad. I'm working at Neotys, the company who publishes it. NeoLoad works at the minimum with HTTP and HTTPS. As REST is just a superset to these, you can load test your API with NeoLoad and this with just the standard license, without any extras.
On top of this, if you are using the JSON format, NeoLoad facilitates the handling of the requests and responses by showing you the XML tree and allowing you to use for instance Xpaths expressions in the content extractors. http://www.neotys.com/documents/doc/neoload/latest/en/html/index.html#862.htm#o867
About SOAP, which brings new operations over HTTP(s), NeoLoad has a module to decode the calls. With NeoLoad, you can load test your webservices based on SOAP
http://www.neotys.com/documents/doc/neoload/latest/en/html/index.html#839.htm
I have the web service URL, login and password, but I can't understand is this SOAP or REST service.
I understand that SOAP is a protocol and REST is just an architecture, but I can't understand the difference between their mechanisms.
Thank you.
SOAP is a set of W3C specifications for web services protocols. In simple terms, those protocols define an XML "wrapper" for providing and consuming web services.
REST is a different kind of concept (as you noted); Wikipedia defines it as an "architecture for distributed systems"; to web developers it's a convenient way of configuring URI schemes to retrieve and update resources. HTTP GET to server/customers/1 gets you info about customer 1, and HTTP PUT to the same URI updates that customer.
In colloquial terms REST is sort of a lightweight alternative to SOAP. Maybe you don't need all the headers, security, and schema that SOAP provides; or maybe you're working in a bandwidth-sensitive area (like mobile web), where you don't want all that overhead. REST is kind of the shorthand way of referring to that alternate paradigm, and tends to get lumped together with other techniques like JSON and AJAX, even though they aren't technically related.
SOAP VS REST
SOAP is a protocol.
REST is an architectural style.
SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.
REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer.
SOAP can't use REST because it is a protocol.
REST can use SOAP web services because it is a concept and can use any protocol like HTTP, SOAP.
SOAP uses services interfaces to expose the business logic.
REST uses URI to expose business logic.
SOAP defines standards to be strictly followed.
REST does not define too much standards like SOAP.
SOAP defines its own security.
RESTful web services inherits security measures from the underlying transport.
SOAP permits XML data format only.
REST permits different data format such as Plain text, HTML, XML, JSON etc.