Access
A key feature of SOAP and web services is their accessibility. The initial developers of SOAP intended for all SOAP conversations to be carried out via a "binding” to another lower-level protocol, and that binding would most likely be HTTP or SMTP. These protocols were chosen because they are almost universally available. Most firewalls have been trained to allow HTTP sessions and SMTP exchanges, so SOAP conversations can easily cross corporate boundaries.
It’s possible to create a SOAP binding for almost any protocol—however, for the time being, HTTP is the de facto binding (and most widely used). Other bindings, such as SOAP over RMI, or SOAP over JMS (for improved reliability), are emerging.
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