16.2 SOAP
SOAP is the oldest of the three ways to implement web services we mentioned. SOAP is still an important standard for web services, and you’ll likely find SOAP in existing projects. New projects, on the other hand, often use web services based on the REST architectural style, which is much more lightweight, flexible, and ultimately easier to implement than SOAP. For this reason, I won’t discuss SOAP in as much detail as I will discuss REST.
In its basic version, SOAP uses XML as the data exchange format and HTTP or HTTPS as the underlying protocol by default, but SOAP is not limited to these protocols and can theoretically be used in combination with other protocols such as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) or File Transfer Protocol ...
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