WebReference.com - Chapter 3 of Professional XML Web Services, from Wrox Press Ltd

Professional XML Web Services

Chapter 3: SOAP Basics^*

The series of excerpts below are from Chapter 3 of the Wrox Press Ltd. title Professional XML Web Services.

With Web Services, we are on the verge of a new programming model. A set of standards has been developed that gives us programmatic access to the application logic of the web. This application logic is accessible to clients on every platform, and in every programming language. Using this model, we can build applications that integrate components using standard Internet protocols. As has already been touched upon in Chapter 1, at the core of the Web Services model is SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), the protocol that allows messages to be transmitted as XML documents and invokes the capabilities of Web Services. The SOAP standard is the key to Web Services.

This chapter delves into SOAP 1.1, and the concepts needed to start using SOAP in applications. We will cover the fundamentals of SOAP and its design, and then we will drill down into the details of SOAP messages, transports, and conventions.

Note that this chapter, and the majority of the rest of the book will focus on SOAP version 1.1, because this is the newest final version, which has support available for it, so is currently the relevant version to learn about.

This chapter will not cover SOAP 1.2, because at the time of writing, it is currently a Working Draft on the W3C, and therefore prone to significant change. SOAP 1.2 is briefly discussed in Chapter 1.

To track the progress of SOAP 1.2, go to the W3C SOAP 1.2 Working Draft document at https://www.w3.org/TR/soap12/, and visit the XML Protocol working group main page at https://www.w3.org/2000/xp/.

Excerpt Contents

• SOAP Fundamentals and SOAP Messages
• Data
• Transports, SOAP and RPC, and Summary

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Created: November 12, 2001
Revised: November 26, 2001

URL: https://webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/webservices/chap3/