The web service protocols
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SOAP
SOAP is...
- the abbreviation for Simple Object Access Protocol
The protocol serves as a distributed object protocol such as RMI or CORBA-IIOP. Thus, whereas RMI is based on the Java platform, and CORBA-IIOP requires the CORBA infrastructure to exchange messages, SOAP is platform and language independent.
- a standard, proposed to the W3C consortium in May 2000 by companies like Ariba, HQ, IBM, Microsoft
- an opportunity to support different transport protocols.
Originally, SOAP was accomplished to transfer messages via http and therefore take advantage of the internet. (Firewalls and proxi servers normally do not block http traffic via port 80) Nevertheless, SOAP can be used with other protocols such as ftp, smtp as well.
A SOAP message is...
- an ordinary XML document, which integrates the SOAP XML Schema by using namespaces.
It consists of three basic elements:
<envelope>: Root, identifies XML documents as a SOAP message
<header>: (optional) infrastructure data
<body>: application data
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <env:Envelope xmlns:env="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"> <env:Header /> <env:Body> <reservation xmlns="http://www.taxi.com/TaxiReservation"> <customer> ... </customer> </reservation> </env:Body> </env:Envelope>