Difference Between RPC and SOAP

RPC vs SOAP

Communication is of vital importance in any field be it in business, politics, personal relationships, and even in saving lives. Another area where communication proves to be of utmost importance is through a computer network. Without proper communication avenues, a typical service requester and service provider cannot function in full. In the Internet universe, there is a thing called Web Service. This is used for easy communication over a network between two electronic devices. As of now, the most commonly used among web services are RPC (Remote Procedure Call) more popularly called XML-RPC and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).

To have a better picture of how these two work in the computer world and Internet universe, XML-RPC is a technology created for accessing information over the Internet. A good example is when an XML-RPC message is delivered to the target server. It normally uses HTTP post requests.

Meanwhile, SOAP is a protocol specification that is used for exchanging structured information utilizing Web Services to cater to the implementation within computer networks. A good example on how it functions is that a SOAP message can be delivered to a web-service-enabled web site like in a real estate price database with needed parameters to do a search. In return, the site will go back to an XML-formatted document with the needed data like the prices. The data acquired can now be easily integrated to a third party application or web site because of its machine-parse-able format is already standardized.

Without these two web services, Internet servicing will be very complicated and unruly. However, there are some distinct differences between the two web services.

First, the designs are obviously different. SOAP’s structural architecture has more complexities compared to RPC. It has XML messages that are being transformed by the use on SOAP-Envelope. RPC, on the other hand, uses XML for both encoding and decoding remote procedure calls within its parameters. It has simpler architecture to use compared to SOAP.

Second, in SOAP, the order is irrelevant and the procedures basically take the named parameters. In XML-RPC it is the other way around. The order is relevant and the procedures do not have to take named parameters.

SOAP is considered to be more powerful; having its 1.2 specs fit 44 pages while RPC fits 6 pages.
Another thing to consider is that SOAP is known to be more verbose yet it is oftentimes more capable than RPC. However, in terms of python support, in the standard library, RPC is greatly supported compared to SOAP.

Indeed, web services are functional and play an integral role in the World Wide Web. There may be some criticisms, especially in their designs and complexities, but as long as Internet users still find ways to utilize these services, they will definitely last.

Summary:

1.SOAP has more complicated designs compared to XML-RPC
2.For XML-RCP, the order is more relevant than the procedure. For SOAP, it is the other way around.
3.SOAP is more powerful in terms of capabilities compared to RPC.
4.RPC, on the other hand, has more python support than that of SOAP.

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