Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and REpresentational State Transfer (REST) are two answers to the same question: how to access Web services.
| SOAP | REST | |
| Support transport | FTP, HTTP, JMS, STMP | HTTP |
| HTTP method | POST | GET, POST, DELETE, PUT |
| Message format | XML | XML, JSON, TEXT, CSV, RSS etc |
| strong typed, WSDL, WS-security | less restrictive about the implementation. | |
| support stateful | Stateless and cachable | |
| Heavy | Light weight | |
| Is a protocol | Architecture style and a design for network based software architecture | |
| Exposed logic via interface and named operations | Expose resource via URI and methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) |
