The purpose of Web Service testing is to verify that all of the Web Service APIs published by your application operate as expected. Web Service API testing requires that you test using all the expected data formats and input parameters.

There are two broad classes of web service:

SOAP – These web services make use of the Web Service Definition Language (WDSL) and communicate using HTTP POST requests. They are essentially a serialization of RPC object calls into XML that can then be passed to the web service. The XML passed to the SOAP web services needs to match the format specified in the WSDL. SOAP web services are fully self-descripting, so most clients do not directly work with the SOAP XML language, but instead use a client-side proxy generator that creates client object representations of the web service (e.g. Java, .NET objects). The web service consumers interact with these language-specific representations of the SOAP web service.

REST – A RESTful web API (also called a RESTful web service) is a web API implemented using HTTP and REST principles. Unlike SOAP-based web services, there is no “official” standard for RESTful web APIs. This is because REST is an architectural style, unlike SOAP, which is a protocol. Typically REST web services expose their operations as a series of unique “resources” which correspond to a specific URL. Each of the standard HTTP methods (POST, GET, PUT and DELETE) then maps into the four basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations on each resource. REST web services can use different data serialization methods (XML, JSON, RSS, etc.).