SOAP vs REST (differences)

Question

I have read articles about the differences between SOAP and REST as a web service communication protocol, but I think that the biggest advantages for REST over SOAP are:

Answer 1

What is REST

REST stands for representational state transfer, it's actually an architectural style for creating Web API which treats everything(data or functionality) as recourse. It expects; exposing resources through URI and responding in multiple formats and representational transfer of state of the resources in stateless manner. Here I am talking about two things:

1. Stateless manner: Provided by HTTP.
2. Representational transfer of state: For example if we are adding an employee. . into our system, it's in POST state of HTTP, after this it would be in GET state of HTTP, PUT and DELETE likewise.

REST can use SOAP web services because it is a concept and can use any protocol like HTTP, SOAP.SOAP uses services interfaces to expose the business logic. REST uses URI to expose business logic.

REST is not REST without HATEOAS. This means that a client only knows the entry point URI and the resources are supposed to return links the client should follow. Those fancy documentation generators that give URI patterns for everything you can do in a REST API miss the point completely. They are not only documenting something that's supposed to be following the standard, but when you do that, you're coupling the client to one particular moment in the evolution of the API, and any changes on the API have to be documented and applied, or it will break.

HATEOAS, an abbreviation for Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State, is a constraint of the REST application architecture that distinguishes it from most other network application architectures. The principle is that a client interacts with a network application entirely through hypermedia provided dynamically by application servers. A REST client needs no prior knowledge about how to interact with any particular application or server beyond a generic understanding of hypermedia. By contrast, in some service-oriented architectures (SOA), clients and servers interact through a fixed interface shared through documentation or an interface description language (IDL).

Reference 1 Reference 2