Dinesh on Java

Categories: SOAP

SOAP Tutorial – What is SOAP?

In this section we discuss all about SOAP Tutorial. SOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks. It relies on XML Information Set for its message format, and usually relies on other Application Layer protocols, most notably Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), for message negotiation and transmission.

SOAP is an XML-based protocol to let applications exchange information over HTTP.
Or more simple: SOAP is a protocol for accessing a Web Service.

SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol
SOAP is a communication protocol
SOAP is a format for sending messages
SOAP is designed to communicate via Internet
SOAP is platform independent
SOAP is language independent
SOAP is based on XML
SOAP is simple and extensible
SOAP allows you to get around firewalls
SOAP is a W3C standard

Although SOAP can be used in a variety of messaging systems and can be delivered via a variety of transport protocols, the initial focus of SOAP is remote procedure calls transported via HTTP.

SOAP enables client applications to easily connect to remote services and invoke remote methods.

Other frameworks, including CORBA, DCOM, and Java RMI, provide similar functionality to SOAP, but SOAP messages are written entirely in XML and are therefore uniquely platform- and language-independent.

Why SOAP?

It is important for application development to allow Internet communication between programs.

Today’s applications communicate using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) between objects like DCOM and CORBA, but HTTP was not designed for this. RPC represents a compatibility and security problem; firewalls and proxy servers will normally block this kind of traffic.

A better way to communicate between applications is over HTTP, because HTTP is supported by all Internet browsers and servers. SOAP was created to accomplish this.

SOAP provides a way to communicate between applications running on different operating systems, with different technologies and programming languages.

History

SOAP was designed as an object-access protocol in 1998 by Dave Winer, Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein for Microsoft, where Atkinson and Al-Ghosein were working at the time. The SOAP specification is currently maintained by the XML Protocol Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium.

SOAP originally stood for ‘Simple Object Access Protocol’ but this acronym was dropped with Version 1.2 of the standard. Version 1.2 became a W3C recommendation on June 24, 2003. The acronym is sometimes confused with SOA, which stands for Service-oriented architecture, but the acronyms are unrelated.

After SOAP was first introduced, it became the underlying layer of a more complex set of Web Services, based on Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI). These services, especially UDDI, have proved to be of far less interest, but an appreciation of them gives a more complete understanding of the expected role of SOAP compared to how web services have actually evolved.

**Contents of SOAP–**

What is SOAP ?
This chapter explains what is SOAP and why SOAP is useful.
SOAP Message Structure
This chapter describes the structure of a complete SOAP message.
SOAP Envelope
This chapter describes the SOAP Envelope element of SOAP message.
SOAP Header
This chapter describes the SOAP Header element of SOAP message.
SOAP Body
This chapter describes the SOAP Body element of SOAP message.
SOAP Fault
This chapter describes the SOAP Fault element of SOAP message.
SOAP Encoding
This chapter describes the built-in set of rules for encoding various data types.
SOAP Transport
This chapter describes the transport protocols for SOAP to exchange the messages.
SOAP Examples
This chapter has given a simple SOAP example to illustrate the concepts.
SOAP Standards
This chapter gives links to latest standards related to SOAP.

References
1. Wikipedia for SOAP

<<Previous << || Index || >>Next >>

Dinesh Rajput

Dinesh Rajput is the chief editor of a website Dineshonjava, a technical blog dedicated to the Spring and Java technologies. It has a series of articles related to Java technologies. Dinesh has been a Spring enthusiast since 2008 and is a Pivotal Certified Spring Professional, an author of a book Spring 5 Design Pattern, and a blogger. He has more than 10 years of experience with different aspects of Spring and Java design and development. His core expertise lies in the latest version of Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Security, creating REST APIs, Microservice Architecture, Reactive Pattern, Spring AOP, Design Patterns, Struts, Hibernate, Web Services, Spring Batch, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Web Application Design and Architecture. He is currently working as a technology manager at a leading product and web development company. He worked as a developer and tech lead at the Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd and was the first developer in his previous company, Paytm. Dinesh is passionate about the latest Java technologies and loves to write technical blogs related to it. He is a very active member of the Java and Spring community on different forums. When it comes to the Spring Framework and Java, Dinesh tops the list!