CODEWITHSUNDEEP
web-servicesrestful-authenticationrestful-architecture
AGS
AGS

Reputation: 21

Stateless request in restfull webservices

In restful web service I read something like below ,

"The constraint to the client-server interaction is that communication must be stateless. The server should not be relied upon to maintain application state by storing session objects."

so does it mean in SOAP web services the server saves the session with them ? I have used soap user interface tool for testing the soap services in which i will be sending the request XML with all the parameters and will be getting the response, In which way restful web services differed in terms of statelessness from Soap ?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 66

Answers (1)

Namphibian
Namphibian

Reputation: 12221

No it does not mean SOAP is stateful in all cases. Typically you design all services as stateless. Having stateful services either in SOAP or REST introduces complexity which creates all sort of problems.

However some people implement both SOAP/REST services with state and they normally aren't very successful. Maintaining state requires both the server and client to be aware of and track the current state.

So in short the principle remains never store state in a service. When calling an operation it should either return a success or failed code, it should not remember that the last operation for this client did not succeed.

Also while REST says services should be stateless you can implement it in a stateful method. Never ever go stateful it creates a lot of confusion for service consumers i.e. the client. Think about it this way if an operation is stateless you can call it and get repeatable results however if it is stateful an operation might change the results based on the state.

Also stateful operations limits scalability as it has to remember more.

Upvotes: 1

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