What is the difference between rest,restful and soap based webservice?

Question

What is the difference between rest, restful and soap based webservices? Are there any other types of webservices?

Please explain the differences to me.

Answer 1

Difference between REST and RESTful has already been discussed here .

Regarding the difference between SOAP and REST there are many resources if you Google for this, how ever to give a fairly shortened answer;

REST is focused on accessing named resources through a single consistent interface, while SOAP is mostly about accessing named operations, each implement some business logic through different interfaces.

The main tangible difference of SOAP is that it has its own XML based infoset (protocol), which is used to carry application level quality of service (QoS) enforcements etc in a standard manner. SOAP Web services in general has a WSDL describing the interface and are discoverable. In the case of REST most of the time it leverage the transport level QoS like TLS (best example is the use of HTTPS to achieve Security) etc.

I am sure there are more deep explanations, but I tried to give a simple differentiation to SOAP vs REST.