Special Edition Using SOAP

SOAP, HTTP, and XML

I can already hear some of the SOAP savvy among you sighing that I chose to lump SOAP, HTTP, and XML together. It’s true that these protocols are useful as separate entities and don’t necessarily depend on each other. However, the real world situation today is that developers do use them together, so for the sake of simplicity, I’m lumping them together for now.

So, what does a SOAP message look like? It depends on the technologies that you use with SOAP, which is why I specified the three technologies I’m using up front. Here’s a simple example—so simple, in fact, that you probably wouldn’t use this form in a real message.

 <SOAP-ENV:Envelope> <SOAP-ENV:Header> </SOAP-ENV:Header> <SOAP-ENV:Body> <GetPerson> <LastName>Mueller</LastName> ...