A performance analysis of WS-* (SOAP) and RESTful Web Services for Implementing Service and Resource Orientated Architectures

The past number of years have seen the emergence of Service-Oriented Architectures as a dominant architecture for implementing enterprise scale distributed systems. Two main styles of SOA exist, namely SOAP based services and RESTful services. There has been much comment and debate on the pros and cons of each approach to implementing a SOA, a lot of which has surrounded the performance characterictcs of both approaches. In this paper, the authors presents the results of a performance analysis that was conducted on a set of test SOA scenarios implemented using both SOAP and RESTful approaches; in particular the caching capabilities of REST have been exploited with significant benefits accruing, an option not available with SOAP based approaches.