What Is SOAP?
XML allows you to describe structured data in a platform-independent and language-independent manner, but it has no mechanism for transporting this data. If two systems want to pass XML data back and forth, they must still decide on a transport protocol. In many ways, CORBA addresses some of the same aspects as XML, but it includes a way to transport data and to package the data into individual requests. Unfortunately, CORBA doesn't use XML for data representation. The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a remote procedure call mechanism that uses XML to encode the request and the result. XML is not a transport protocol; it's just a data representation protocol. SOAP can use any number of transport protocols, the most common ...
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