Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) are often used as labels to refer two different approaches to implementing a web-based Application Programming Interface (API).

The growth of cloud-based services in recent years has pushed the chances of working with such interfaces from rare to almost certain.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

• Web requests
• Working with REST
• Working with SOAP

SOAP interfaces typically use the New-WebServiceProxy command in Windows PowerShell. This command is not available in PowerShell Core as the assembly it depends on is not available. The command is unlikely to be available in PowerShell Core unless it is rewritten.