SOAP Introduction

Web service is a peice of software that can accessed over the web in the form of a service. SOAP is a protocol for accessing web services over http.

Important points about SOAP

1. SOAP is a xml based protocol
2. SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.
3. SOAP was developed as an intermediate language so that various applications built on different programming languages could talk to each other with ease.

Communication between applications developed in different technologies is the demand of the time. But without having a common protocol between these applications, exchange of data isn’t easy. SOAP is the answer to this complexitiy. Since, SOAP uses xml as an intermediate language for communication, it becomes easy for applications to talk to each other, because xml is understood by almost every programming language.

Although, xml is uderstood by all programming languages, there are no standard specifications on use of XML across all programming languages for data exchange. That is where SOAP software comes in.

SOAP was designed to work with XML over HTTP. It has some sort of specification which could be used across all applications.

Advantages of SOAP

• SOAP protocol is recommended by the W3C consortium which is the governing body for all web standards.
• SOAP is a light-weight protocol that is used for data exchange between applications. This is becaue SOAP programming is based on the XML language, which itself is a light weight data interchange language.
• SOAP is designed to be platform independent and is also designed to be operating system independent.
• SOAP works on HTTP protocol, which is the default protocol used by all web applications.