This is my first blog. Learning a new tool can be challenging for beginners. I created this table to get an overall idea of the popular API's which can be tested with POSTMAN tool. The differences below are from an API testers perspective.
SOAP API | RESTful API | GraphQL API |
Simple Object Access Protocol | Representation State Transfer Protocol | GraphQL uses a query language for API |
Data is sent in the XML format in the request to the endpoint | JSON,XML or Text format is used to send data in the request to the endpoint | Uses GraphQL which is very similar to JSON to send request |
POST request is preferred as a lot of XML details have to be provided in GET method compared to POST. | GET,POST,PUT,DELETE calls can be easily made | In GraphQL both GET and POST methods can be used but POST request call on the API is easy |
Envelope data has to be provided in the body before sending the request. | Not required | Not required |
More data than required is fetched from a response . This slows down big applications. Large bandwidth is needed | More data than required is fetched from a response . This slows down big applications. Large bandwidth is NOT needed compared to SOAP | Exact data what is needed can be fetched using queries.Large bandwidth is not needed |
In the header, content type has to be selected or deselected depending upon the SOAP service application/xml or text/xml | Headers can be set such as content type JSON if needed | Content-type: application/graphql is set in headers |
Fetching data from different resources will have to be done using multiple API calls | Fetching data from different resources will have to be done using multiple API calls | Fetching data with a single API call |