Java Web Services

Anatomy of a SOAP Message

The SOAP specification describes four major components: formatting conventions for encapsulating data and routing directions in the form of an envelope, a transport or protocol binding, encoding rules, and an RPC mechanism. The envelope defines a convention for describing the contents of a message, which in turn has implications on how it gets processed. A protocol binding provides a generic mechanism for sending a SOAP envelope via a lower-level protocol such as HTTP. Encoding rules provide a convention for mapping various application datatypes into an XML tag-based representation. Finally, the RPC mechanism provides a way to represent remote procedure calls and their return values. Throughout this book, we’ll refer to these four areas collectively as a SOAP message .

How XML Becomes SOAP

We start this discussion by focusing on the document exchange model. To clarify this topic, we use a simple purchase order document, PO.xml . This document is overly simplified because it contains only two things—a ship-to address and an item entry:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<PurchaseOrder xmlns="urn:oreilly-jaws-samples">
    <shipTo country="US">
        <name>Joe Smith</name>
        <street>14 Oak Park</street>
        <city>Bedford</city>
        <state>MA</state>
        <zip>01730</zip>
    </shipTo>
    <items>
        <item partNum="872-AA">
            <productName>Candy Canes</productName>
            <quantity>444</quantity>
            <price>1.68</price>
            <comment>I want candy!</comment>
        </item>
    </items>
</PurchaseOrder>

PO.xml is not yet ...