A comparative analysis of SOAP and REST Web service composition based on performance in local and remote Cloud environments

Abstract

Web services are an attracting area that interest many researchers and industrial organizations. Given the convenience and reusability, web services have become a main mode of cloud application. Web services can be developed based on two interaction styles such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer Protocol (REST). Nevertheless, the function of single web service is usually too simple to satisfy the user’s complex demand. Therefore, it is necessary to combine a set of basic web services in order to create a composite web services. However, most existing work on the comparison of SOAP and REST focuses on a single micro-service and fails to outline the performance of those two approaches in a real-case situation where, most of the time, multiple micro-services are bound together to provide a more holistic answer to user requests. In this paper, we try to tackle this issue from a more business-centered perspective. We use a case study involving multiple services both in local and remote Cloud environments with SOAP Web services composition and REST Web services composition. The first environment will help us find out the behavior in a more controlled situation compared to the latter where multiple service providers are involved.