Building RESTful Web Services with PHP 7

REST versus SOAP

One old alternative to REST is SOAP. In fact, SOAP was already, used when REST came along as an alternative. A key difference is that SOAP doesn't have some particular convention that tells consumers how to access that. SOAP exposes its services using WSDL. Consider WSDL as a definition of services that SOAP provides. This is how the consumer knows what SOAP based web service provides and how to consume them.

On the other hand, REST emphasizes on "conventions over configurations". If you look at the URL structures and HTTP verbs of RESTful web services as we did earlier, there is a fixed convention. For example, if you are at the client side and want to create a product, if you know what parameters it will take then you can ...