MP3Car.com - OSDash - Data Exchange Standard

tripzero's thoughts on the data standard.

tripzero — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:47:40 GMT

I think we've all agreed that the technology of choice should should be restful. Since restful services return xml, i suppose we can say that XML is the data standard. Obviously, the web service should return relevant data for each service, what else would be useful for the client to return? For example, the login service would return a session key:

Code:





  23432ffaafddd32423dd2ff

or on a failure:

Code:





  bad username or password

Because most of the node names and attributes will be service-specific, like "session" is for the login service, I suppose the stuff that we can standardize is the root elements and associated attributes, maybe error nodes? What else?

SOAP and RESTful Utilities

ioi8 — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 23:31:26 GMT

Thought I would share some utilities to help with development.

SOAP UI - GUI based SOAP testing
REST UI - Clone of the above for REST

If you guys know of any more useful utilities, post them here.

Soap vs rest

tripzero — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:25:00 GMT

Matt did something similar, but I just wanted to post a pros/cons list of my own and finalize the debate over the protocol/data transfer mechanism:

SOAP

Pros:
- Supports Complex arguments and return types
- Can generate code from WSDL (no parsing on client)
- Supports Security and Encryption.

Cons:
- Heavier protocol when compared to REST

REST

Pros:
- Lightweight for simple calls
- Supports return results in XML

Cons:
- Client still has to do parsing (this will likely be abstracted via the OSDash Client library/assembly).

I'm sure there are more pros/cons to each. Personally, I think the code generation and automatic parsing is the killer feature of SOAP. I'd like to hear what other people think on the debate. I'll keep this OP updated with additional pro's con's as comments appear...