SOAP

This article is about the computer network protocol. For other uses, see Soap (disambiguation).

SOAP, originally an acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of web services in computer networks. It uses XML Information Set for its message format, and relies on application layer protocols, most notably Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), for message negotiation and transmission.

Characteristics

SOAP can form the foundation layer of a web services protocol stack, providing a basic messaging framework for web services. This XML-based protocol consists of three parts:

SOAP has three major characteristics:

  1. extensibility (security and WS-routing are among the extensions under development)
  2. neutrality (SOAP can operate over any transport protocol such as HTTP, SMTP, TCP, UDP, or JMS)
  3. independence (SOAP allows for any programming model)

As an example of what SOAP procedures can do, an application can send a SOAP request to a server that has web services enabled—such as a real-estate price database—with the parameters for a search. The server then returns a SOAP response (an XML-formatted document with the resulting data), e.g., prices, location, features. Since the generated data comes in a standardized machine-parsable format, the requesting application can then integrate it directly.

The SOAP architecture consists of several layers of specifications for:

SOAP evolved as a successor of XML-RPC, though it borrows its transport and interaction neutrality and the envelope/header/body from elsewhere (probably from WDDX).

History

SOAP was designed as an object-access protocol in 1998 by Dave Winer, Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein for Microsoft, where Atkinson and Al-Ghosein were working.[2] Due to politics within Microsoft,[3] the specification was not made available until it was submitted to IETF 13 September 1999.[4][5] Because of Microsoft's hesitation, Dave Winer shipped XML-RPC in 1998.[6]

The submitted Internet Draft did not reach RFC status and is therefore not considered a "standard" as such. Version 1.1 of the specification was published as a W3C Note on 8 May 2000.[7] Since version 1.1 did not reach W3C Recommendation status, it can not be considered a "standard" either. Version 1.2 of the specification, however, became a W3C recommendation on June 24, 2003.

The SOAP specification[8] was maintained by the XML Protocol Working Group[9] of the World Wide Web Consortium until the group was closed 10 July 2009. SOAP originally stood for "Simple Object Access Protocol" but version 1.2 of the standard dropped this acronym.[10]

After SOAP was first introduced, it became the underlying layer of a more complex set of Web Services, based on Web Services Description Language (WSDL), XML Schema and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI). These different services, especially UDDI, have proved to be of far less interest, but an appreciation of them gives a more complete understanding of the expected role of SOAP compared to how web services have actually evolved.

Specification

SOAP structure

The SOAP specification defines the messaging framework, which consists of:

Processing model

The SOAP processing model describes a distributed processing model, its participants, the SOAP nodes, and how a SOAP receiver processes a SOAP message. The following SOAP nodes are defined:

SOAP Building Blocks

A SOAP message is an ordinary XML document containing the following elements:

Element Description Required
Envelope Identifies the XML document as a SOAP message. Yes
Header Contains header information. No
Body Contains call, and response information. Yes
Fault Provides information about errors that occurred while processing the message. No

Transport methods

Both SMTP and HTTP are valid application layer protocols used as transport for SOAP, but HTTP has gained wider acceptance as it works well with today's internet infrastructure; specifically, HTTP works well with network firewalls. SOAP may also be used over HTTPS (which is the same protocol as HTTP at the application level, but uses an encrypted transport protocol underneath) with either simple or mutual authentication; this is the advocated WS-I method to provide web service security as stated in the WS-I Basic Profile 1.1.

This is a major advantage over other distributed protocols like GIOP/IIOP or DCOM, which are normally filtered by firewalls. SOAP over AMQP is yet another possibility that some implementations support. SOAP also has an advantage over DCOM that it is unaffected by security rights configured on the machines that require knowledge of both transmitting and receiving nodes. This lets SOAP be loosely coupled in a way that is not possible with DCOM. There is also the SOAP-over-UDP OASIS standard.

Message format

XML Information Set was chosen as the standard message format because of its widespread use by major corporations and open source development efforts. Typically, XML Information Set is serialized as XML. A wide variety of freely available tools significantly eases the transition to a SOAP-based implementation. The somewhat lengthy syntax of XML can be both a benefit and a drawback. While it promotes readability for humans, facilitates error detection, and avoids interoperability problems such as byte-order (endianness), it can slow processing speed and can be cumbersome. For example, CORBA, GIOP, ICE, and DCOM use much shorter, binary message formats. On the other hand, hardware appliances are available to accelerate processing of XML messages.[11][12] Binary XML is also being explored as a means for streamlining the throughput requirements of XML. XML messages by their self-documenting nature usually have more 'overhead' (Headers, footers, nested tags, delimiters) than actual data in contrast to earlier protocols where the overhead was usually a relatively small percentage of the overall message.

In financial messaging SOAP was found to result in a 2–4 times larger message than previous protocols FIX (Financial Information Exchange) and CDR (Common Data Representation).[13]

XML Information Set does not have to be serialized in XML. For instance, a CSV or JSON XML-infoset representation exists. There is also no need to specify a generic transformation framework. The concept of SOAP bindings allows for specific bindings for a specific application. The drawback is that both the senders and receivers have to support this newly defined binding.

Example message

POST /InStock HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.org
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 299
SOAPAction: "http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
  <soap:Header>
  </soap:Header>
  <soap:Body>
    <m:GetStockPrice xmlns:m="http://www.example.org/stock/Surya">
      <m:StockName>IBM</m:StockName>
    </m:GetStockPrice>
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

Technical critique

Advantages

Disadvantages

See also

References

  1. ↑ Hirsch, Frederick; Kemp, John; Ilkka, Jani (2007). Mobile Web Services: Architecture and Implementation. John Wiley & Sons. p. 27. ISBN 9780470032596. Retrieved 2014-09-15. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) defines a messaging envelope structure designed to carry application payload in one portion of the envelope (the message body) and control information in another (the message header).
  2. ↑ "Exclusive .NET Developer's Journal "Indigo" Interview with Microsoft's Don Box". Dotnet.sys-con.com. Retrieved 2012-10-04.
  3. ↑ "Don Box on the history of SOAP". XML.com. 2001-04-04.
  4. ↑ "XML Cover Pages on the history of SOAP". Coverpages.org. Retrieved 2003-07-22.
  5. ↑ "SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol". September 1999.
  6. ↑ "XML-RPC for Newbies". Archive.org. 1998-07-14. Archived from the original on October 12, 1999.
  7. ↑ "W3C Note on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1". W3C. 2000-05-08.
  8. ↑ "SOAP Specifications". W3C. Retrieved 2014-03-29.
  9. ↑ "W3C XML Protocol Working Group". W3C. Retrieved 2014-03-29.
  10. ↑ "SOAP Version 1.2 Part 1: Messaging Framework (Second Edition)". W3C. April 27, 2007. Retrieved 2012-06-15. Note: In previous versions of this specification the SOAP name was an acronym. This is no longer the case. (Underneath section 1. Introduction)
  11. ↑ "IBM Datapower". 306.ibm.com. 2011-11-30. Retrieved 2012-10-04.
  12. ↑ "IBM Zurich XML Accelerator Engine" (PDF). Retrieved 2012-10-04.
  13. ↑ "Evaluating SOAP for High Performance Business Applications: Real-Time Trading Systems". Tenermerx Pty Ltd University of Technology, Sydney. 2011-11-30. Retrieved 2013-03-14.

Further reading

External links

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