Comparison of variants

Each of the methods has advantages and disadvantages. Which of the variants is best for you is therefore dependent on many factors. To make this decision a little easier for you, we compare their advantages and disadvantages below.

Effort as well as required programming knowledge are very low for an integration with FACT-Finder Web Components.

With the other integration variants, code must be created or used to process the search results, and thus greater programming knowledge is required.

So what are the differences between the SOAP, XML and JSON interface? The interfaces are very different and it is not necessarily a simple matter to switch from one to the other. Each interface has its own advantages and disadvantages:

Web service / SOAP: Knowledge of this technology means that it is relatively simple to start using it with most programming languages. Client code is generated from the WSDL and can be used immediately. The disadvantage is the data overhead for the web service interface, which is used for strict type-casting. The volume of data for a given search query is six times larger than when using the XML interface.

XML: As it is a proprietary format, the XML must be parsed and processed. However, XSLT can be used to process the data.

JSON: Fundamentally, this interface is even leaner than XML, and this is particularly noticeable in the case of large volumes of data. However, a processing method must also be designed when using JSON.