Comparative Study of REST and SOAP: Case of Registrar of Political Parties’ Kenya

Abstract

This project focuses on the comparative studies of Representational state Transfers (REST) and Simple Object Access protocol (SOAP), it demonstrates on how REST can perform better compared to SOAP in terms of consolidating data from different sources and presenting it in a common relational databases that can be used on a day to day activities. The data is presented in a web service in the form of HyperText MarkUp Language (HTML), Extensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). It is also show how applications built on REST consume less memory and load fast compared to the ones build on SOAP, in addition to performance and scalability which is a key feature of REST. They differ in context and usage; SOAP is a protocol while REST is architecture though they are all based on web service. The comparative study of the two technologies is based on the data from different sources submitted by political parties to the registrar of parties. Experiments were done to measure how much time and memory a SOAP and REST clients in PHP take in accessing the web service applications. The response messages and results showed that a REST client performs better on this than a SOAP client. Also experimented on scalability to determine how the two grow to accommodate increasing number of users, applications and systems.