Simple Object Access Protocol

(soap)

A lightweight protocol designed to use XML for information exchange in a decentralized, distributed environment. The protocol consists of:

• an envelope that describes the message and how to deal with it,
• encoding rules for the datatypes, and
• a convention used for representing remote procedure calls and responses.

SOAP can be used with a variety of protocols. The initial specification only describes how to use SOAP with HTTP and HTTP Extension Framework.

More Information

• W3C Note
• DevelopMentor's SOAP FAQ
• MSDN SOAP Resource Center