About SOAP

What is SOAP?

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is an XML-based protocol for accessing web services over HTTP and few other protocols. It has some specifications which can be used across all applications and platforms.

SOAP follows a strict messaging structure, a set of encoding rules, and a convention for providing rendering requests and responses.

Advantages

• SOAP communicates over HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, SMTP, FTP, XMPP, and more, unlike REST which communicates over HTTP and HTTPS only.

• SOAP can have its own implementation of security SOAP WS-Security that allows it to encrypt messages and have authentication data in the message header.

• SOAP is ACID-compliant (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability).

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In this lesson, we learned about the SOAP web service and its advantages. In the next lesson, we will learn about the building blocks of SOAP messages and Web Service Definition Language (WSDL).