biotext.org.uk

One of the current ongoing R&D projects at CATH is the development of a library of web services for both internal and external use. The first step in this process was the selection of a web service toolkit (or ’stack’) to use, as there are several competing (and often mutually incompatible) frameworks available. This page compares some of them in brief based on some informal evaluations and background reading.

Note that I am far from being an expert in this field, so feel free to leave a comment if there’s anything here you disagree with. I am, as ever, happy to be corrected.

Also, please don’t get the impression that this is a methodical side-by-side comparison. I would have liked to implement the exact same non-trivial service in each stack, and report systematically on my experiences with each, but in reality I just didn’t have time to do it that rigourously. What I present here is the result of going through one or two tutorials (mostly of the Hello World/echo-a-string/double-a-number kind), reading the docs, hanging out on forums and garnering opinion from blog posts and articles. And the amount of time I spent with each toolkit is admittedly variable.

I hope it will be useful to someone, despite the caveats.

Andrew.

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