Why Is SOAP Needed?
This innocent-looking question is actually a very good one to ask. RPC protocols grew from research in the mid-1980s that had roots all the way back to Tim Berners-Lee and his description of TCP/IP—and even the invention of Ethernet itself, circa 1970 by Bob Metcalfe, later of 3Com fame. The concept of distributed computing dates back farther than that. The creators of the ENIAC envisioned that one day large numbers of computers would be linked to solve very complex problems.
In the case of RPC and SOAP, the distributed computing issue is simply one of consuming resources on a remote computer as if the remote computer and the calling (local) machine were the same machine. The goal is to seamlessly tie the distributed systems ...
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