Chapter 1. How We Got To SOAP
To understand why we need a technology such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) we need to spend a bit of time looking at how computing technology has evolved. SOAP itself started out as a way to make distributed computing platform agnostic. We have always had the concept of distributed computing. The idea of having people perform calculations that they are good at and then handing the work off to other mathematicians is nothing new. For example, logarithms take a long time to compute. Because of this, people wrote out and reproduced logarithmic tables for other mathematicians to use.
To review the history, I would like to take a look at the things we have done in moving from the abacus to mechanical calculators ...
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