Web API for Biology provides WEB services using both SOAP and REST. (*)

  1. How to use SOAP
  2. How to use REST
  3. Available services
* SOAP and REST
Web API for Biology prepares both SOAP and REST as a way of using WEB service. REST service has been open to the public since Aug 2007. REST service has advantages compared to SOAP service as follows.

- REST is easy to use
Only you have to do is to input the URL in the web browser for accessing REST service. Furthermore we make sure that various program languages such as Perl, Java, C, Ruby and Python can be used in the case of using from a program. And you can also use REST services by using telnet or wget command.

- REST is easy to treat large-scale data
REST service provides you with the result as a stream. Therefore you can retrieve the result every one line and lower the machine load since it isn't saved to the computer memory. So you can retrieve large-scale data effectively by using REST service compared to SOAP. For example if you want to get a DDBJ genome data of Escherichia coli with flat file format, REST service provides you with more than three times speed compared to SOAP.

- On the other hand, SOAP service has also advantages that coding volume is small and it has extensibility.