Chapter 4. SOAP

SOAP is the fundamental messaging framework for Web services. With SOAP, you can access Web services through loosely coupled infrastructure that provides significant resilience, scalability, and flexibility in deployment using different implementation technologies and network transports.

SOAP provides four main capabilities:

• A standardized message structure based on the XML Infoset

• A processing model that describes how a service should process the messages

• A mechanism to bind SOAP messages to different network transport protocols

• A way to attach non-XML encoded information to SOAP messages

Before discussing these capabilities, it's important to cover some of the history of SOAP.