Chapter 3. The SOAP Specification

SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol, is an interapplication communication mechanism. SOAP specifies three different items:

  1. A packaging model (the SOAP envelope).

  2. A serialization mechanism (the SOAP encoding rules).

  3. An RPC mechanism (the SOAP RPC representation).

The group that specified SOAP designed these three pieces to work together but nothing prevents a developer from using only one of the items. For example, a program may use the SOAP encoding rules to save configuration files. An instant messaging system could use the packaging model to send data between the parties involved in a conversation. With RPC, one could ignore the envelope and just use the encoding rules and RPC representation to make the function ...

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