Over time, standards for the design and development of web services came out in order to allow the integration of different systems and guarantee interoperability.

Web services can be classified by their type of architecture, among which SOA (Software Oriented Architecture) and ROA (Resource Oriented Architecture) stand out. The SOA-based framework is SOAP which lays its foundation on web services, while the ROA-based framework is REST which also lays its foundation on resources web services (Wagh and Thool, 2012).

Some experts say SOAP is not made for mobile devices with limited resources. SOAP messages have a heavy load, on the contrary, the messages of the REST framework are light load, which makes it the most suitable for use on mobile devices and networks.

In the last decade, a Software REST architecture style has become popular. RESTful Web Services are presented as a great alternative to SOAP-based services due to their simplicity and light nature, as well as the ability to transmit data directly over HTTP.

To provide scalability and interoperability to a platform, it is very important to implement a technological tool that can be reused within any other technological platform required. A software architecture oriented to the resources' recovery such as REST allows an application to be invoked as a service providing the ability to access its functions from another platform.

Regardless of the programming language or framework in which it is developed, a REST API allows us to communicate different systems and platforms thanks to the use of HTTP. Currently, these architectures can be implemented both in “On-Premise” infrastructure and in a public cloud such as Azure, AWS, or GCP and even in a hybrid model that combines the 2 approaches.

REST is positioned as an ideal alternative if you want to implement a cross-platform application since it has the potential to create scalable applications as well as the characteristic of low use of resources, essential characteristics for the performance of a web and/or mobile application.

References

Wagh, K., & Thool, R. (2012). A comparative study of soap vs rest web services provisioning techniques for mobile host. Journal of Information Engineering and Applications, 2(5), 12-16