Never Say REST Protocol & SOAP Service

I am now a days learning and exploring Webservices Testing.During last couple of month, Whatever blog,sites that i visited i was always getting to see few posts/content related to Webservices testing,SoapUI etc etc.This is the only which forced me to get inclined towards this field.Then i started reading articles,searching for video tutorials,going through wiki.After few days of exploration, i understood that in the field of Webservice Testing, you need to be pretty much clear on the concept,terminology.I would like to discuss most commonly used terminology here in this post.

SOA(Service oriented Architecture)

Service is as simple as a business unit/functionality which is really independent and has a consistent outcome.Service is :

• Loosely Coupled
• Executable unit
• Having consistent set of outcome

Example:

Customer-care,Hospitals providing health services,Restaurants etc etc.

SOA

Human being can very well talk with an web application and can have a good interaction whereas earlier it was not possible for two software to communicate with each other and SOA was the solutions for it.It is a kind of architecture which is the combinations if services and messages.Below diagram explains it better:

If you look at the above diagram , you can see it has 3 components:

• Service Consumer
• Service Provider
• Broker/3rd Party

Simple Analogy

Lets say, i have a car which got some minor dents due to an accident.Now i need to fix these dents.I went to the Dealer(Chevvy) and i explained everything to the Receptionist guy.Now that guy helped me to complete the registration process and he introduced me to the Mechanical Dept. who will taking up the dent work and finally he fixes it and closes the job sheet.Now:

• Me: The service consumer here who need the service(Fixing of dent work)
• Receptionist Guy: Broker who introduces me  to correct service provider
• Mechanical Dept: Service provider

REST

REST stands for Representational State Transfer which is an architectural style(concept,theory) and it implements SOA and bult on the top of HTTP.Hence it has few simple http methods like: GET,PUT,DELETE,POST etc.

SOAP

SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol and it is used to establish a communication between two services.Requests and responses are represented in the form of xml notation.

SOAP is a protocol which helps in communicating in between two services.SOAP request can be understood by looking at the envelop.Soap envelop contains Header and body which creates a representation and distinguishes it among other protocols.

Note:

• REST is not a protocol
• SOAP is not a Service
• WSDL file is used to register service description into UDDI(Broker)
• SOAP request always has a wsdl file where REST services are not involved with any