I'm not satisfied with the answers given by the SOAP vs REST questions notably here:
Performance of SOAP vs. XML-RPC or REST
because it's just general philosophical answers and not pragmatic answers with some study cases.
Nobody can give precise cases of when soap would be more suitable than rest, especially as for performance point of view ?
Update:I think REST is winning the war.
Performance is not the deciding factor.
First I should say, asking a SOAP-vs-REST question is a little cockeyed, because SOAP is a XML envelope format, and REST is an architecture. So I will make a little assumption and suppose that you are really considering SOAP-vs-POX or SOAP-vs-JSON or SOAP-vs-some other data formatting approach.
The deciding factor should be this:
Do you now need, or will you need in the future, the SOAP envelope?
The SOAP Envelope allows things like framework-provided encryption, digsig, routing, and authorization checks, among other things. You can of course, do those things with REST (or more accurately, with plain-old-XML, or JSON, etc) but you have to do more work yourself, to make that happen.
If Performance - whatever you construe it to mean - really is your #1 criterion, then you should probably abandon SOAP and POX and move to protobufs or something else optimized for performance. These can be faster to serialize and faster to transmit.
If you think this answer is "too philosophical" and you really want hard figures, well, then I suppose you'll need to conduct some tests. The actual perf will vary greatly on the toolkits you choose, the shape of the messages, and the extra data services (like encryption and so on) that you use. But in the end, perf won't be, or shouldn't be, decisive either way.
If your SOAP toolkit is 20% easier to use. debug, and maintain as your POX toolkit, then you should use SOAP, regardless of the performance. People (coders, architects, testers) are much more expensive than CPUs and networks these days. You can always buy another 2 cpus, or a bigger network, if necessary, and if your design is correct. But you can't buy 20% less time developing, at any cost, if your framework is hard to use, or if it drives away your people. Unless you are running a geo-scale network, you will do better to optimize for the people, instead of for the network.
You can find an article comparing REST and SOAP here:
http://www.jopera.org/files/www2008-restws-pautasso-zimmermann-leymann.pdf
Authors conclusions seemed to be:
Use RESTful services for tactical, ad hoc integration over the Web
Prefer WS-* Web services in professional enterprise application integration scenarios with a longer lifespan and advanced QoS requirements
Personally I do not like terminology like "professional enterprise" because it is loose and informal. However in my opinion authors made some good points in the article. Maybe to conclude and to give some own thoughts:
If you want to make API public - do it in RESTful way. Why? It is simple to use for a client application so it will make your service more popular. For example Amazon is exposing both REST and SOAP APIs, but 85% of their users have chosen REST version Amazon API - SOAP vs. REST
Use SOAP and WS-* stack if you will create (or you have some control of the process of creating) both consumers and producers of your services and you do need advanced features of WS-*. This will probably required more resources also because SOAP applications tends to be "heavier" (more features, but more sophistication also).
Also considering performance REST could be faster (messages are definitely shorter and you do not need to parse xml).
Hope it will help.
In your example of flash client - it is really hard to tell without knowing the details, however if one do not need all this security and transactional features of WS-* I think building REST application would be simpler and faster.
Answering to comment
I should use soap because i'm in so
called "professional enterprise"
And assuming of course that your choice isn't really dictated by big software vendors.
SOAP is suited for bigger enterprises because it encourages more formal approach. It offers specifications, which are huge, so your developers may need time to learn them and maybe even some professional training --> so spending companies resources. It also offers tools - and not all of them are open source, so this can also mean additional resources. But if your team will learn this way of integrating services it will probably be efficient and resulting code will be high quality.
REST in contrary is more a philosophy of developing applications. So, no huge specifications, no specialized tools. No resource spending. This may work nice if you have a small team of good programmers - they will not need so many guidelines if they know the basic principles . Unfortunately it is also easier to do things wrong.
Another thing to consider is the applications size - the richer the API, the more services you want to integrate, the harder it will be to do it RESTful. Also building small SOAP application wouldn't be probably a good idea - whole overhead and entrance cost is just too high.
You need to evaluate pros and cons for your project. It is impossible to give recommendation without knowing all the details I think.
And finally - this has nothing to do with reasonable arguments but more with politics. I think that management level people seem to prefer WS-* stack and SOAP (it has support of "big enterprises" so it is easier for them to justify their choose). On the other hand people from academic background[1] prefers REST - because there is still a lot of research that can be conducted in the area.
[1] I'm somewhere in between, so I can observe both behaviors ;-)
Related
We have a webservice built in Axis2/c in which the methods in turn calls an in-house application on the server. Since Axis2/c was widely accepted to be good as far as performance and stability was concerned, we were sticking to it. But now we're trying to make it RESTful [not completely, although I'm more towards making it truly RESTful, I couldn't win this time :( ].
I couldn't find any good tutorials on RESTful services in axis2/c. But searching around google & stackoverflow got me curious about apache wink. Should I move away from axis2/c? If so is wink a good choice? I'm a dot net developer so I'm fairly new to this world, but which one will serve the need? Please suggest other frameworks as well.
My concerns are:
performance
security
make the service simple enough that client side development becomes quite easy
authentication mechanism to use.
PS: I know that I've asked lot of questions, sorry but I'm just a curious newbie.
I'll try to answer the concerns:
Performance: when talking about REST (well actually it's the same about SOAP), most of the time is spent for serialization/deserialization of objects (assuming the the actual application logic is very fast). In SOAP you must serialize to xml and in Axis2 you have choice which framework to use. For example you can use JiBX, which probably does it best.
In REST, you can decide if you want to serialize to xml or may be another representation (e.g. json) which will be faster.
About 1.5 years ago I did some comparison of REST frameworks and actually Wink had the best performance in most scenarios (I compared it to Jersey, Restlet and Resteasy). To ignore the serialization part, I made them all use the same implementation of JAXB. But again: most of the time is spent to serialization. So the difference between the frameworks is not so huge.
Security - Wink as any other RESTful web service is based on HTTP. It doesn't provide any additional security. You can use SSL/TSL, or basic/digest authentication. You can use SAML, or whatever you want. Just every other HTTP call.
It's your design. If you make it simple, it will be simple :)
Again: it's HTTP. If you have SSL/TSL, you can use basic authentication. If not, you may want to use digest.
Brief summary: personally I prefer RESTful webservices to SOAP. Although you don't get all the WS* stack, somehow it is better defined, more flexible and easier to understand.
Apache Wink is a great framework, well documented with a lot of samples, and will probably answer all your needs, but to be honest, Jersey is not bad either.
I am a total newbie to the world of SOA. As such, I am looking at some "SOA frameworks/technologies", and trying to understand how to utilize them to build a highly scalable (Facebook class) website.
There are several "pains" I am trying to solve here:
Composability (+ managing dependencies, Pub/Sub)
Language-independence of services
Scalability & Performance
High availability
I looked into some technologies that answer a subset of the above criteria:
Thrift - Facebook's cross-platform RPC platform
WCF - supports SOAP, JSON & REST, so it can be considered language-interoperable. Generates WSDL files that can be use to generate java proxies.
Microsoft DSS - just inclued it in my survey, but it doesn't seem relevant as it is highly state-driven and .NET specific.
Web Services
Now, I understand how I get some aspects of composability and language-independence out of the above. But, I haven't found much concrete information (not buzz) about how to use the above / other tools for scalability and high availability. So finally I get to my question:
How does one leverage SOA technologies to solve the pains I defined above? Where can I find technical guides for that? I am looking for more than just system diagrams, but rather actual libraries, code samples, APIS...
I think the question has more to do with the concepts involved than the tools. Answers to the items:
Understand and internalize bounded context. Keeping unrelated pieces separate its important to get real reuse on different services. Related technologies won't help you on this, its you that separate the app in appropriate contexts, which you can appropriately reuse for different services.
Clear endpoint for communication based on known protocols allows implementing different pieces with different technologies
Having the operations flow like independent actions based on different protocols, gives you a lot of places where you can add tiers. Is a particular sub-process of the overall process using lots of resources and the server can't take it anymore, just move to a separate server. Load kept growing, and that server isn't taking it anymore, add an additional server and load balance. You also have more opportunity to use caching and connection pooling.
Have a critical sub-process that needs to be available all the time, add a server so you can have a fail over. Have an overall process that needs to be "available" all the time, use queues for pieces that can be processed later.
Do you really need to support that type of load? Set appropriate performance/load/interoperability targets that relate to the specific scenario. If you really need to support that type of load, I recommend you get someone on board who has dealt with it.
If it is something for a load that might eventually be, identify the bounded contexts and design the interaction between those with a SOA mindset. Keeping the code clean is all you have to do for the rest, use TDD, loose coupling, focused integration tests, etc in your code base. With good code, if you later need to separate pieces of the system, it will be a lot easier.
There are interesting and relevant things said about services and architecture by Amazon's CTO - Werner Vogels:
An interview about the Amazon technology platform
A post on his blog - "Eventually Consistent - Revisited"
A 50 min presentation about Availability & Consistency
IDesign.net has a bunch of great downloads for WCF.
Worth a look at: http://www.manning.com/davis/ ?
Check out the Mule project which bundles the CXF services stack and also the Mule REST pack which provides RESTful alternatives. I think you'll see it addresses all of your pains and there are lots of examples in the documentation as well as the distribution.
May I recommend the book: Enterprise Service Oriented Architectures published by Springer Verlag.
All of the advice here is well and good, but don't worry about it until you really need to.
Focus on building a usable, functional application that people really like. When you start running into problems, then start handling bottlenecks.
You will never be able to foresee every way an application will fail, so how can you tell if [[insert tech here]] is your answer?
Related:
Why would one use REST instead of Web services?
When deciding whether to implement a web service using SOAP or REST (by which I mean HTTP/XML in a RESTful manner) what should I be aware of and what should I be thinking of? I presume that this isn't a one size fits all thing so how do I choose which to use.
The two protocols have very different uses in the real world.
SOAP(using WSDL) is a heavy-weight XML standard that is centered around document passing. The advantage with this is that your requests and responses can be very well structured, and can even use a DTD. The downside is it is XML, and is very verbose. However, this is good if two parties need to have a strict contract(say for inter-bank communication). SOAP also lets you layer things like WS-Security on your documents. SOAP is generally transport-agnostic, meaning you don't necessarily need to use HTTP.
REST is very lightweight, and relies upon the HTTP standard to do it's work. It is great to get a useful web service up and running quickly. If you don't need a strict
API definition, this is the way to go. Most web services fall into this category. You can version your API so that updates to the API do not break it for people using old versions(as long as they specify a version). REST essentially requires HTTP, and is format-agnostic(meaning you can use XML, JSON, HTML, whatever).
Generally I use REST, because I don't need fancy WS-* features. SOAP is good though if you want computers to understand your webservice using a WSDL. REST specifications are generally human-readable only.
The following links provide useful information about WSDL vs REST including Pros and Cons
A couple of key points are that
1) SOAP was designed for a distributed computing environment where as REST was designed for a point to point environment.
2) WADL can be used to define the interface for REST services.
http://www.ajaxonomy.com/2008/xml/web-services-part-1-soap-vs-rest
http://ajaxonomy.com/2008/xml/web-services-part-2-wsdl-and-wadl
Regarding WSDL (meaning "SOAP") as being "heavy-weight". Heavy matters how? If the toolset is doing all the "heavy lifting" for you, then why does it matter?
I have never yet needed to consume a complicated REST API. When I do, I expect I'll wish for a WSDL, which my tools will gladly convert into a set of proxy classes, so I can just call what appear to be methods. Instead, I suspect that in order to consume a non-trivial REST-based API, it will be necessary to write by hand a substantial amount of "light-weight" code.
Even when that's all done, you still will have translated human-readable documentation into code, with all the attendant risk that the humans read it wrong. Since WSDL is a machine-readable description of the service, it's much harder to "read it wrong".
Just a note: since this post, I have had the opportunity to work with a moderately complicated REST service. I did, indeed, wish for a WSDL or the equivalent, and I did, indeed, have to write a lot of code by hand. In fact, a substantial part of the development time was spent removing the code duplication of all the code that called different service operations "by hand".
This probably really belongs as comments in several of the above posts, but I don't yet have the rep to do that, so here goes.
I think it is interesting that a lot of the pros and cons often cited for SOAP and REST have (IMO) very little to do with the actual values or limits of the two technologies. Probably the most cited pro for REST is that it is "light-weight" or tends to be more "human readable". At one level this is certainly true, REST does have a lower barrier to entry - there is less required structure than SOAP (though I agree with those who have said that good tooling is largely the answer here - too bad much of the SOAP tooling is pretty dreadful).
Beyond that initial entry cost however, I think the REST impression comes from a combination of the form of the request URLs and the complexity of the data exchanged by most REST services. REST tends to encourage simpler, more human readable request URLs and the data tends to be more digestable as well. To what extent however are these inherent to REST and to what extent are they merely accidental. The simpler URL structure is a direct result of the architecture - but it could be equally well applied to SOAP based services. The more digestable data is more likely to be a result of the lack of any defined structure. This means you'd better keep your data formats simple or you are going to be in for a lot of work. So here SOAP's additional structure, which should be a benefit is actually enabling sloppy design and that sloppy design then gets used as a dig against the technology.
So for use in the exchange of structured data between computer systems I'm not sure that REST is inherently better than SOAP (or visa-versa), they are just different. I think the comparison above of REST vs SOAP to dynamic vs. static typing is a good one. Where dyanmic languages tend to run in to trouble is in long term maintenance and upkeep of a system (and by long term I'm not talking a year or 2, I'm talking 5 or 10). It will be interesting to see if REST runs into the same challenges over time. I tend to think it will so if I were building a distributed, information processing system I would gravitate to SOAP as the communication mechanism (also because of the tranmission and application protocol layering and flexibility that it affords as has been mentioned above).
In other places though REST seems more appropriate. AJAX between the client and its server (regardless of payload) is one major example. I don't have much care for the longevity of this type of connection and ease of use and flexibility are at a premimum. Similarly if I needed quick access to some external service and I didn't think I was going to care about the maintainability of the interaction over time (again I'm assuming this is where REST is going to end up costing me more, one way or another), then I might choose REST just so I could get in and out quickly.
Anyway, they are both viable technologies and depending on what tradeoffs you want to make for a given application they can serve you well (or poorly).
REST is not a protocol; It's an architectural style. Or a paradigm if you want. That means that it's a lot looser defined that SOAP is. For basic CRUD, you can lean on standard protocols such as Atompub, but for most services you'll have more commands than just that.
As a consumer, SOAP can be a blessing or a curse, depending on the language support. Since SOAP is very much modelled on a strictly typed system, it works best with statically typed languages. For a dynamic language it can easily become crufty and superfluous. In addition, the client-library support isn't that good outside the world of Java and .NET
To me we should be careful when we use the word web service. We should all the time specify if we are speaking of SOAP web service, REST web service or other kind of web services because we are speaking about different things here and people don't understand anymore if we named all of them web services.
Basically SOAP web services are very well established for years and they follow a strict specification that describe how to communicate with them based on the SOAP specification.
Now REST web services are a bit newer and basically looks like simpler because they are not using any communication protocol. Basically what you send and receive when you use a REST web service is plain XML. People like it because they can parse the xml the way they want without having to deal with a more sophisticated communication protocol like SOAP.
To me REST services are almost like if you would create a servlet instead of a SOAP web service. The servlet get data in and return data out. The format of the data are xml based. We can also imagine to use something else than xml if we want. For instance tags could be used instead of xml and that would be not REST anymore but something else (Could be even lighter in term of weight because xml is not light by nature). Would we call that still a web service? Yes we could but that will not follow any current standard and this is the main issue here if we start to call everything web services but we can do it the way we want then we are loosing on the interoperability side of the things. That means that the format of the data that is exchanged with the web service is not standardized anymore. That requires then that server and client agree on the format of the data whereas with SOAP this is all predefined already and server and client can interoperate without to know each other because they follow the same standard.
What people don't like with SOAP is that they have hard time to understand it and they cannot generate the queries manually. Computers can do that very well however so this is where we need to be clear: are web services queries and response supposed to be used directly by the end users or do we agree that web services are underneath API called by computer systems based on some normalized standards?
SOAP: It can be transported via SMTP also, means we can invoke the service using Email simple text format also
It needs additional framework/engine should be in web service consumer machine to convert SOAP message to respective objects structure in various languages.
REST: Now WSDL2.0 supports to describe REST web service also
We can use when you want to make your service as lightweight, example calling from mobile devices like cell phone, pda etc...
for enterprise systems in which your system is confined within your corporations, its easier and proper to use soap because you are almost in control of clients. it's easier since there a variety of tools which creates classes (proxies) and looks like you are doing your regular OOP which matches your java or .net environment (in which most corporates use).
I would use REST for internet facing applications for exposing interfaces (like twitter api) since clients can be using javascripts or html or others in which typing is not strict. REST being more liberal makes more sense.
Also for internet facing clients (world wide web), its easier to parse json or xml coming out of a rest interface rather than a purely xml coming from a soap interface. it's hard to use proxies on javascript and javascript does not naturally support objects. If you are using REST with javascript, you would just usually parse the json string and you're off. internet facing interfaces are usually very simple (so most of the time its simple parsing) and does not usually demand consistency that is why REST is adequate enough.
For enterprise applications I don't think REST is adequate because transactions, security, strict typing, schemas play a very important in enterprise applications development that is why SOAP is more suited for them.
My conclusion is that SOAP is for Enterprise systems, REST is for the Internet or WWW.
You can use it interchangeably but you may find yourself having a difficult time eventually not using the correct tool for the job.
sorry for my bad english.
In defence of REST it closely follows the principles of HTTP and addressability e.g. read operations use GET, update operations use POST etc. I find this to be a far cleaner approach. The Oreilly book RESTful Web Services explains this far better than I can, if you read it I think you would prefer the REST approach
The toolset on the client side would be one. And the familiarity with SOAP services the other. More and more services are going the RESTful route these days, and testing such services can be done with simple cURL examples.
Although, it's not all that difficult to implement both methods and allow for the widest utilization from clients.
If you need to pick one, I'd suggest REST, it's easier.
The previous answers contain a lot of information, but I think there is a philosophical difference that hasn't been pointed out. SOAP was the answer to "how to we create a modern, object-oriented, platform and protocol independent successor to RPC?". REST developed from the question, "how to we take the insights that made HTTP so successful for the web, and use them for distributed computing?"
SOAP is a about giving you tools to make distributed programming look like ... programming. REST tries to impose a style to simplify distributed interfaces, so that distributed resources can refer to each other like distributed html pages can refer to each other. One way it does that is attempt to (mostly) restrict operations to "CRUD" on resources (create, read, update, delete).
REST is still young -- although it is oriented towards "human readable" services, it doesn't rule out introspection services, etc. or automatic creation of proxies. However, these have not been standardized (as I write). SOAP gives you these things, but (IMHO) gives you "only" these things, whereas the style imposed by REST is already encouraging the spread of web services because of its simplicity. I would myself encourage newbie service providers to choose REST unless there are specific SOAP-provided features they need to use.
In my opinion, then, if you are implementing a "greenfield" API, and don't know that much about possible clients, I would choose REST as the style it encourages tends to help make interfaces comprehensible, and easy to develop to. If you know a lot about client and server, and there are specific SOAP tools that will make life easy for both, then I wouldn't be religious about REST, though.
You can easily transition your WSDL-spewing WCF web components to other uses just by changing your configuration settings. You can go across HTTP and then also named pipes, tcp, custom protocols, etc without having to change your code. I believe WCF components may also be easier to set up for stuff like security, two-way calling, transactions, concurrency, etc.
REST pretty much limits you to HTTP (which is fine in many cases).
I know that this discussion is an old one, but after reading all the answers and commented, I believe that everyone missed the most important point about the difference between the 2 systems: SOAP uses complex types to not only give you the data, but validate it and keep it in the strict type designation it was defined for. A WSDL tells you what the data format is, what the data type is, allows you to add reg-ex pattern-style rules, and defines how many times a piece of data must be, and may be, allowed in a request/response.
Rest on the other-hand has none of these mechanisms.
SOAP is complex and heavy because it allows you to send complex heavy hierarchical data. REST is plain text, with the origin and endpoint sorting out the rules.
SOAP is business independent, because it has all the data rules embedded in the document.
The difference between SOAP and REST is that SOAP is a self-contained business oriented schema. REST is a text document.
I'm implementing an SOA at a large company, and I'm not sure which web service specifications (WS-*) actually make sense to implement. At a minimum, I'm looking at WS-Addressing, WS-Security, WS-Eventing, and WS-ReliableMessaging. However, there are several other standards that look interesting, but I don't know which ones are widely adapted. I don't want to implement a standard (and force all the developers to follow them) if they're not mature or necessary.
EDIT:
I'm asking this question not about a specific situation, but in general. There are quite a few WS-* standards that don't seem to have a lot of practical use (at least to me), so I'm really curious about which ones are widely used.
Thanks for your help!
KA
WS-Adressing is widely used, and quite useful. For WS-Security, consider the set of mechanisms you'll need (based on your usage scenarios).
Only SOAP is widely adopted. If you care about reach, going beyond WS-Security and WS-Addressing is asking for trouble (even WS-Security can be hard for a lot of people). If you are creating services for internal use in a large company, then I wouldn't worry as much. Something like WCF would allow you to provide endpoints with different bindings for a wide range of consumers without writing any additional code.
There are two types of web services : REST and SOAP. They represent different protocols of sending data over the internet.
SOA is an acronym standing for Service Oriented Architecture. It is a way of architecturing your system using multiplet tiers (applications) one atop the other. Web services, mostly soap based are used to implement this archtecture, but they are not the only way.
I have no experience with web services. Historically I've built client-server systems using proprietary communication protocols (even they happen to be XML). I just spent a few hours looking over Axis2 and it sent a shudder down my spine. The learning curve of WS scares me, and seeing all that XML surround so little functionality makes me wonder if it's worth the trouble.
How do you decide whether you need to use Web Services or a custom communication protocol? What are the advantages/disadvantages of each approach and what use-cases are they best suited for?
Please post a clear guideline, not an opinion piece :)
Build RESTful web APIs; then you get a lot of automatic caching and etc benefits that you don't get if you use other methods (SOAP, XML-RPC, etc)
See this post for more details
Another benefit is that if you build a RESTful API for your code to use, you can potentially let your users take advantage of it too - they often have uses for your product that you never dreamed of.
"Web Services" as defined by the W3C means using SOAP over HTTP. SOAP is severe overkill in most cases; it's only really appropriate (IMO) when you're making a public service available to the world, like an API for interacting with your website, for example.
Anything else (especially internal, private communications) rarely need anything more complex than XML-RPC. Only if performance is an issue should you consider a more condensed protocol; XML-RPC is so simple and widely-supported that the ease of development and debugging more than makes up for the performance loss of using bloaty ol' XML.
Remember that there are a number of frameworks out there that make programming web services very trivial stuff. In the VB / C# world .Net makes it a joy. I'm not really sure about specific frameworks for other languages but I am sure most have at least one.
The standardisation and simplicity of implementation and reuse of web services make them very attractive. As previously pointed out- yes, they make communications very verbose. If you are worried about this why not calculate how much data you actually will be trasmitting. chances are, with current network and internet speeds, it will be trivial - even with the XML overhead.
I would always use the custom data formats as a last resort and not a first. What widely used method you use it up to you but it's unlikely you would go wrong with Web Services model.
Maintainability and extensibility are the main benefits. The use of widely used technology your solution will be easier for someone else to understand plus you can use ready to roll libraries as consumers and providers.
I have recently broken my custom protocol habit. I am now using Apache on the server side and libCurl plus libxml2 to load and parse the XML on the client which is written in C++.
The server side can be either PHP or a CGI written in a more serious language. Depends what you want to do.
Webservices have the advantage of being somewhat standard, so it's possible for programs you've never heard of to use a webservice you wrote. Using HTTP can help them communicate over proxies and other network obstacles without any extra work from you. The XML, although rather verbose and ugly, is rather easier to read when debugging than binary data.
When you're transferring stuff over the network, it's unlikely that serialisation/deserialisation to xml will be the limiting factor in performance. It can be a bit of hassle, although a library to do it for you will help a lot.
SOAP and XML -- "all that XML surround so little functionality makes me wonder if it's worth the trouble."
Totally. SOAP is heavy-weight, and -- to a large extent -- a workaround to the need for static binding throughout the Java technology stack.
REST, on the other hand, is much lighter weight. Further, REST with JSON or REST with YAML is very lightweight, and very easy to implement. It builds right on top of the off-the shelf HTTP protocol.
REST requires you to define resources (named via URI's), and transactions based on the canonical CRUD rules (GET, POST, PUT and DELETE). Very simple and canonical.
In my personal (old cranky dude) opinion, web services should only be used as a way to make some of your internal information available to third parties (i.e. other companies, people outside your organization etc.). Of course, that is also the originally intended purpose of XML. :-)
If you have access to a direct connection with the databases containing the information your application needs - that is the way to go. It's faster and simpler - which in application development means "better" and "less buggy".