Java Web Services: A Performance Analysis

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Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is being increasingly used by developers both in web applications and in mobile applications. Within web services there are two main implementations: SOAP communication protocol and REST. This work presents a comparative study of performance between these two types of web services, SOAP versus REST, as well as analyses factors that may affect the efficiency of applications that are based on this architecture. In this experimental evaluation we used an application deployed in a Wildfly server and then used the JMeter test tool to launch requests in different numbers of threads and calls. Contrary to the more general idea that REST web services are significantly faster than SOAP, our results show that REST web services are 1% faster than SOAP. As this programming paradigm is increasingly used in a growing number of client and server applications, we conclude that the REST implementation is more efficient for systems which have to respond to less calls but have more requests in a connection.