JSON, REST, SOAP, WSDL, and SOA: How do they all link together

WSDL: Stands for Web Service Description Language

In SOAP(simple object access protocol), when you use web service and add a web service to your project, your client application(s) doesn't know about web service Functions. Nowadays it's somehow old-fashion and for each kind of different client you have to implement different WSDL files. For example you cannot use same file for .Net and php client. The WSDL file has some descriptions about web service functions. The type of this file is XML. SOAP is an alternative for REST.

REST: Stands for Representational State Transfer

It is another kind of API service, it is really easy to use for clients. They do not need to have special file extension like WSDL files. The CRUD operation can be implemented by different HTTP Verbs(GET for Reading, POST for Creation, PUT or PATCH for Updating and DELETE for Deleting the desired document) , They are based on HTTP protocol and most of times the response is in JSON or XML format. On the other hand the client application have to exactly call the related HTTP Verb via exact parameters names and types. Due to not having special file for definition, like WSDL, it is a manually job using the endpoint. But it is not a big deal because now we have a lot of plugins for different IDEs to generating the client-side implementation.

SOA: Stands for Service Oriented Architecture

Includes all of the programming with web services concepts and architecture. Imagine that you want to implement a large-scale application. One practice can be having some different services, called micro-services and the whole application mechanism would be calling needed web service at the right time. Both REST and SOAP web services are kind of SOA.

JSON: Stands for javascript Object Notation

when you serialize an object for javascript the type of object format is JSON. imagine that you have the human class :

class Human{
 string Name;
 string Family;
 int Age;
}

and you have some instances from this class :

Human h1 = new Human(){
  Name='Saman',
  Family='Gholami',
  Age=26
}

when you serialize the h1 object to JSON the result is :

  [h1:{Name:'saman',Family:'Gholami',Age:'26'}, ...]

javascript can evaluate this format by eval() function and make an associative array from this JSON string. This one is different concept in comparison to other concepts I described formerly.

Imagine you are developing a web-application and you decide to decouple the functionality from the presentation of the application, because it affords greater freedom.

You create an API and let others implement their own front-ends over it as well. What you just did here is implement an SOA methodology, i.e. using web-services.

Web services make functional building-blocks accessible over standard Internet protocols independent of platforms and programming languages.

So, you design an interchange mechanism between the back-end (web-service) that does the processing and generation of something useful, and the front-end (which consumes the data), which could be anything. (A web, mobile, or desktop application, or another web-service). The only limitation here is that the front-end and back-end must "speak" the same "language".

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That's where SOAP and REST come in. They are standard ways you'd pick communicate with the web-service.

SOAP:

SOAP internally uses XML to send data back and forth. SOAP messages have rigid structure and the response XML then needs to be parsed. WSDL is a specification of what requests can be made, with which parameters, and what they will return. It is a complete specification of your API.

REST:

REST is a design concept.

The World Wide Web represents the largest implementation of a system conforming to the REST architectural style.

It isn't as rigid as SOAP. RESTful web-services use standard URIs and methods to make calls to the webservice. When you request a URI, it returns the representation of an object, that you can then perform operations upon (e.g. GET, PUT, POST, DELETE). You are not limited to picking XML to represent data, you could pick anything really (JSON included)

Flickr's REST API goes further and lets you return images as well.

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JSON and XML, are functionally equivalent, and common choices. There are also RPC-based frameworks like GRPC based on Protobufs, and Apache Thrift that can be used for communication between the API producers and consumers. The most common format used by web APIs is JSON because of it is easy to use and parse in every language.