SOAP Introduction

Used to be Simple Object Access Protocol, but lack of Object made them drop name
It is a packaging protocol for remote procedure calls.
Encoding is done in XML, using XML Schema and relying heavily on XML namespaces.
The SOAP standard defines the protocol. This encourages interoperability.
SOAP is a lot simpler to implement than the equivalent for CORBA, RMI, or DCOM.
- There are a lot of implementations, for every language.
A SOAP user does not have to understand the whole thing before he can do something useful. He can ignore parts of the XML.
SOAP is used for
- Passing documents: Electronic Document Interchange (EDI).
- Remote Procedure Calls (RPC).