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17.1.SOAP
The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a lightweight, extensible, XML-based application layer protocol for information exchange in a decentralized, distributed environment. SOAP defines a framework for message structures and a message processing model. SOAP also defines a set of encoding rules for serializing data and a convention for making remote procedure calls. The SOAP extensibility model provides a foundation for a wide range of composable modules and protocols. Although the most common way to transport SOAP messages is HTTP, it may also be run on top of other protocols.
SOAP includes:
| an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it |
| a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined datatypes |
| a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses. |