The new section of the Dot-Com Builder web site features technical overview articles, including one by Tom Clements on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Tom Clements is a freelance technical writer and poet, specializing in JavaTM technology API documentation, XML/XSLT, device-driver writing, and wireless communications.

According to Clements, SOAP, in its most basic definition, allows Java technology objects and COM objects to talk to each other in a distributed, decentralized, web-based environment. SOAP allows objects (or code) of any kind, on any platform, in any language, to cross-communicate. Put even more simply, SOAP is an extensible, text-based framework for enabling communication. At present, SOAP has been implemented in over sixty languages on over twenty platforms.

The foundational paradigm of SOAP is crucial to the continuing evolution of web services. Web services facilitate interactions among platform-independent objects, which are able to access data from anywhere on the web. As part of the movement away from proprietary platforms, web services rely on loose, rather than tight, couplings among web components. Loosely coupled systems allow for flexible and dynamic interchange in open, distributed web environments. Web services offer the promise of broad-based application interoperability.

Web services are reusable component programs that utilize XML as a standard, extensible communication framework to facilitate computer-to-computer communication. SOAP is a technology that derives from an earlier XML-based standard (XML-RPC) and points toward an emerging standard called ebXML (electronic business XML).

All information between the requesting application and the receiving object is sent as tagged data in an XML stream over HTTP. Therefore, SOAP documents are able to traverse almost any firewall, enabling the exchange of information across divergent platforms.

SOAP servers ensure that documents received over a HTTP connection are converted to a language that the object at the other end understands. Because all communications are made in the form of XML, objects in one language (for example, Java technology) may communicate through SOAP with objects in any other language (C++, for example).

SOAP and web services account for everything needed to build a distributed application infrastructure on top of XML. SOAP minimizes the problem of multiple-platform incompatibilities in accessing data by resolving the conflict between the COM and Java technology component object models.

Additional technical details, including a sample SOAP envelope, a SOAP use case, and other illustrations of SOAP usage, along with code are available on the web page.

http://dcb.sun.com/practices/webservices/overviews/overview_soap.jsp [...read more...]

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