Currently, the vogue is
JSON-based services over XML/SOAP. In addition, RESTful services are also in
style over WSDL-based services, especially for basic data operations (CRUD),
although depending on the language and web stack, this isn't as big a deal.
JSON is short
for JavaScript Object Notation, and is a way to store information in
an organized, easy-to-access manner. It is used primarily to transmit data
between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. In a nutshell,
it gives us a human-readable collection of data that we can access in a really
logical manner.
JSON is a lightweight
data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy
for machines to parse and generate. JSON is a text format that is completely
language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of
the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl,
Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange
language.
REST stands for
Representational State Transfer. It is a stateless software architecture that
provides many underlying characteristics and protocols that govern the
behavior of clients and servers. REST is a web standards based architecture and uses HTTP Protocol for
data communication. It revolves around resources where every component is a
resource and a resource is accessed by a common interface using HTTP standard
methods.
A REST service has a few advantages over a more traditional
WSDL-based service:
* The completely URL-based
resource request hides the sausage-making behind the scenes of a modern
dynamically-generated website or service pack, so your URLs are cleaner (and
somewhat harder to hack in a harmful way)
* The URL-based navigation
also makes navigation of your REST API from within a browser easier; in fact,
Quora itself uses REST to serve up the actual pages, in addition to an AJAX
layer providing live updates. The resulting resources are easily bookmarked or
permalinked without you having to actually have a page in your website for each
resource.
* REST uses the actual
HTTP action verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS) to expose and define
functionality available for a single resource, giving you more for
"free" on the client side and providing a more intuitive,
standardized way for clients to dynamically construct a service request.
JSON also has a few
advantages over XML for the average use case. JSON is more lightweight (fewer
markup characters required), more easily parsed by web clients (it's JavaScript
Object Notation, after all; it's used to declare/instantiate objects in
JavaScript code so it's very easily parsed), and more human-readable. However,
as JavaScript is effectively a dynamically-typed ("duck-typed")
language, where almost everything is just a "var", JSON data does not
include type information by default.
When developing a new
service that you expect to be consumed by third parties, and you put the
question to them, those third parties will virtually always vote for REST and
JSON.
