REST

Due to the complexities accompanied with the SOAP model, Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture has emerged as a result. RESTful web services can be considered as a lightweight alternative to the bulky and complex SOAP based web service standards. In RESTful web services, the emphasis is on point-to-point communication over HTTP, primarily using plain old XML (POX) messages. We will discuss RESTful web services in detail in Chapter 8, Getting started with REST Testing.

Java Script Object Notation

Java Script Object Notation (JSON) is a lightweight data exchange format similar to XML. It is based on a subset of JavaScript language. JSON uses key value pairs to represent data which are carried inside the message. The following example shows how the XML payload of a SOAP message can be represented in JSON:

The corresponding JSON format of the preceding XML payload is represented by:

You may refer to http://www.json.org for more details about JSON.