SOAP and the W3C

SOAP 1.1 was originally submitted to the W3C in May 2000. Official submitters included large companies, such as Microsoft, IBM, and Ariba, and smaller companies, such as UserLand Software and DevelopMentor.

In September 2000, the W3C created a new XML Protocol Working Group. The goal of the group is to hammer out an XML protocol for information exchange and recommend the protocol as an official W3C recommendation.

In July 2001, the XML Protocol Working Group released a “working draft” of SOAP 1.2. Within the W3C, this document is officially a work in progress, meaning that the document is likely to be updated many times before it is finalized. However, so far, SOAP 1.2 does not represent a radical departure from SOAP 1.1 and is primarily aimed at clarifying ambiguous issues within the SOAP 1.1 specification. Most developers should therefore find the transition from 1.1 to 1.2 relatively painless.

Tip

The W3C has broken the SOAP 1.2 specification into two parts. Part I describes the SOAP messaging framework and envelope specification. Part II describes the SOAP encoding rules, the SOAP-RPC convention, and HTTP binding details.

Once finalized, SOAP may work its way up to official W3C recommendation status. Until that time, however, it is important to note that SOAP has no official commitment from the W3C. Even SOAP 1.1 has a status of “Note”, meaning that it is currently open to the W3C membership for discussion.

Tip

SOAP originally stood for Simple Object Access ...

Get Web Services Essentials now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.