SOAP -standard for web servicies

AuthorAssoc.Prof. Ph.D. Eng. Adriana Barnoschi
PositionUniversity "N. Titulescu" Romania
1. Introduction

Short for Simple Object Access Protocol, a lightweight XM L-based messaging protocol used to encode the information in Web service request and response messages before sending them over a network. SOAP messages are independent of any operating system or protocol and may be transported using a variety of Internet protocols, including SMTP, MIME, and HTTP. Based on XML, it allows the transfer of data through the HTTP headers. This means you can conduct all you transfer on port 80, therefore preventing the opening of any security holes on your server.

SOAP consists of two files: Client and Server (the basic model in Internet), and its dependant on the XMLDOM and XMLHTTP objects.

SOAP is a standard means of sending communications from one Web server to another, regardless of platform or Web server software being used. SOAP messages a standard designed to enable server communications via an XML-formatted message through the HTTP protocol. The SOAP client sends a SOAP request to the SOAP server, which, in turn, sends back a SOAP response.

SOAP consists of three parts:

  1. The SOAP envelope - construct defines an overall framework for expressing what is in a message; who should deal with it, and whether it is optional or mandatory.

  2. The SOAP encoding rules - defines a serialization mechanism that can be used to exchange instances of application-defined datatypes.

  3. The SOAP RPC representation - defines a convention that can be used to represent remote procedure calls and responses.

Although these parts are described together as part of SOAP, they are functionally orthogonal. In particular, the envelope and the encoding rules are defined in different namespaces in order to promote simplicity through modularity.

In addition to the SOAP envelope, the SOAP encoding rules and the SOAP RPC conventions, this specification defines two protocol bindings that describe how a SOAP message can be carried in HTTP messages either with or without the HTTP Extension Framework.

A major design goal for SOAP is simplicity and extensibility. This means that there are several features from traditional messaging systems and distributed object systems that are not part of the core SOAP specification. Such features include

-Distributed garbage collection

-Boxcarring or batching of messages

-Objects-by-reference (which requires distributed garbage collection)

-Activation (which requires objects-by-reference)

2. The SOAP Message Exchange...

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