December 01, 2005
Amazon Web Services
REST versus SOAP
The proliferation of web services has brought out an interesting focus on REST versus SOAP. Those in favor of REST argue for HTTP's built-in security (SSL). On the other hand, SOAP offers flexibility in delivery through other modes of transport by storing address information in the SOAP envelope. While Amazon ECS offers both scenarios to developers, we opted for SOAP because it provides consistency across different applications.
This feature was especially important in developing ScanZoom since the screen of the cell phone is limited in both size and resolution compared to that of typical displays. Because of this constraint, we couldn't simply redirect users to an HTML web page (such as Amazon's product pages) because navigating it would be nearly impossible. In addition, many of the stock web browsers available on mobile devices do not support the full HTML collection and require a special XHTML Mobile Profile compliant page. Because Amazon provides access to its information through XML, we were free to format its content in a way that made it simple for the end user to understand and navigate, even on primitive cell-phone browsers, while still allowing the functionality that one would expect with more advanced PDA-type handsets. ECS also let us handle browser-compatibility issues, increasing the number of handsets that we can support.
—A.M. and J.H.
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