Hello Experts,
We are aware that SAP Gateway is a product offering from SAP which has now close to 8K customer installations (may be higher than this). This is really a tremendous growth and achievement from both SAP as well as its customers/partners standpoint enabling technology simple to consume SAP data through any popular environment or device or browsers following REST principles. Prior to Gateway we had something called “Web services” to integrate SAP data with Microsoft etc. We also have NW Mobile, BAPI, LMS but I am taking web services into the table.
Few advantages which I believe Gateway is preferable over SOAP based web services are
1.Easy consumption in all channels like browsers, mobile phones etc.
2. OData defines an abstract & common data model and a protocol that let any client access information exposed by any data source by using common libraries.
3.OData requests are simple as like a SQL DB query. However web services which use SOAP request are quite complex to consume in thin client like mobile. A typical SOAP request look like
4. SOAP exposes application –defined services but OData allows access to an entire application-defined data model.
5. Summarizing REST & SOAP features.
However I have queries like
1.What are the ideal use cases for choosing Web services (SOAP) and for SAP Gateway(OData based REST services) from a customer perspective?
@ Experts ,Gateway topic leaders and everyone : Please share your thoughts so that we get better understanding of SOAP and REST.
References :
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/hh237663.aspx
http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-soap-when-to-use-each
Cheers
Prabaharan Asokan