PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF RESTFUL WEB SERVICES AND SOAP / WSDL WEB SERVICES

Service Oriented Architecture is style of software design for building software application that use services available in a network such as the web. RESTful HTTP and SOAP/WSDL services are two architectural styles for building web services, where SOAP/WSDL based services follows an operation centric approach and RESTful HTTP based services follows resource centric approach.These web services are well defined, self-contained in terms of its dependency on other web services components. Client has two choices for the purpose of communication with web services - Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) over HTTP and Representational State Transfer with HTTP. Today mobile devices and web services are very popular and choice of web service architectural style (SOAP/WSDL or REST) is very important, as mobile phone has physical constraint such as low processing speed, limited memory and slow intermits wireless connection. I have implemented a prototype systems and conducted extensive experiment with SOAP / WSDL web services and RESTful web services with same mobile client. The experiment results demonstrate that RESTful web services have much improved performance and scalability as compared to SOAP / WSDL web services.