# RESTful Comparison
# Overall
| Feature | SOAP | REST | GraphQL | RPC |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Released Year | 1999 | 2000 | 2015 | 1998 XML-RPC 2005 JSON-RPC |
| Organized in terms of | enveloped message structure | compliance with 6 arch constraints | schema & type system | local procedure call |
| Format | XML | XML, JSON, HTML, plain text | JSON | JSON, XML, Protobuf, Thrift, FlatBuffers |
| Learning curve | Difficult | Easy | Medium | Easy |
| Community | Small | Large | Growing | Large |
| Use cases | - payment gateways - identity management - CRM solutions - financial & telecommunication services - legacy system support | - public APIs - simple resource-driven apps | - mobile APIs - complex systems - micro-services | - command & action oriented APIs - high perf communication in massive micro-services systems |
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# RESTful vs RPC
Communication between different software systems can be established using either RPC (Remote Procedure Call) or RESTful (Representational State Transfer) protocols, which allow multiple systems to work together in distributed computing.
| Feature | REST | RPC |
|---|---|---|
| Coupling | ✅ Weak coupling | ❌ Strong coupling |
| Data format | text, XML, JSON | Binary thirft, protobuf, Avro |
| Communication Protocol | HTTP | TCP |
| Performance | ❌ Lower than RPC | ✅ High |
| Interface definition languge (IDL) | Swagger | thrift, protobuf |
| Client code generation | Auto-generated stub | Auto-generated stub |
| Language Framework | SpringMVC, ... | gRPC, thrift |
| Developer friendness | ✅ human readable, easy to debug | ❌ human unreadable, hard to debug |
When choosing between RPC and RESTful, consider your application's needs. RPC might be a better fit if you require a more action-oriented approach with custom operations, while RESTful would be a better choice if you prefer a standardized, resource-based approach that utilizes HTTP methods.
# RESTful vs GraphQl
| Feature | REST | GraphQL |
|---|---|---|
| Client-Server Arch | ✅ | ✅ |
| Tooling Server | ✅ | ✅ |
| Tooling Client | ❌ | ✅ |
| Declarative data fetching | ❌ | ✅ |
| Stateless | ✅ | ✅ |
| Cacheable | ✅ | ❌ |
| Format | JSON, XML, HTML, Plain text | JSON |
| Methods | GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, OPTIONS | Query & Mutation & Subscription |
| Protocols Used | HTTP | HTTP, Websocket |
| Use cases | Public APIs | Mobile APIs, complex, nested data dependencies |