Summary

Although SOAP provides many means for creating robust services with routing, transactions, and other powerful features, sometimes all you need is a simple, scalable interface to data. REST services are one means of providing that simple interface. REST relies on simple, stateless HTTP requests and stable but composable URLs to provide a highly scalable interface for Web services. REST is easy to comprehend and work with, using only the GET and POST methods of HTTP; but it provides a clean mechanism for working with data if all the methods are used.