Comparing Architectural Styles for Service-Oriented Architectures - a REST vs. SOAP Case Study

Two architectural styles are currently heavily discussed regarding the design of service-oriented architectures (SOA). Within this chapter we have compared those two alternative styles – the SOAP-style with procedural designs similar to remote procedure calls and the REST-style with loosely coupled services similar to resources of the World Wide Web. We introduce the case of a business network consisting of manufacturers and service providers of the electronics industry for deriving a set of requirements towards a specific SOA implementation. For each architectural style we present a concrete SOA design and evaluate it against the defined set of requirements.