I am writing a thesis which involves a comparison between RESTful web APIs and their corresponding alternatives. The problem is, I am quite biased towards REST and am failing to find any noteworthy architectural patterns that could be compared.
My comparison is going to analyze the patterns (or styles) from the consumer perspective (primarily how universal is an API for consumers).
Could you recommend me any alternatives for REST (as a software architectural pattern for comparison in the mentioned aspect? So far, I'm stuck with SOAP.
P.S. If the question is still too broad, I can narrow it down a bit.