Section 4.1. A Brief History of SOAP

4.1. A Brief History of SOAP

SOAP started off as the Simple Object Access Protocol, developed by Microsoft, Developmentor, and Userland. Subsequently, IBM and Lotus contributed to a revised specification that resulted in SOAP version 1.1 [SOAP 1.1] published in April 2000. This specification was widely accepted throughout industry and formed the basis of several open source interoperable implementations. WS-I.org adopted it as part of its basic profile.

The authors submitted the SOAP 1.1 specification to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in May 2000, where it was treated as an input document for the formation of the XML Protocol (later becoming known as SOAP) Working Group in September 2000.The charter of this working group was to bring about the standardization of SOAP.

People were confused about what the SOAP acronym represented with several popular interpretations being used. In early deliberations, the working group decided that SOAP would no longer be an acronym; from then on, it was simply known as SOAPperiod. The W3C working group finally produced the SOAP 1.2 Recommendation in June 2003. The Recommendation consisted of a primer [SOAP 1.2 Part 0], messaging framework [SOAP 1.2 Part 1], and adjuncts [SOAP 1.2 Part 2]. The working group has also developed specifications for attachments [MTOM], [XOP].