- SOAP
- Doing Business with SkatesTown
- Inventory Check Web Service
- A Closer Look at SOAP
- The SOAP Messaging Framework
- SOAP Intermediaries
- The SOAP Body
- The SOAP Processing Model
- Versioning in SOAP
- Processing Headers and Bodies
- Faults: Error Handling in SOAP
- Objects in XML: The SOAP Data Model
- The SOAP RPC Conventions
- XML, Straight Up: Document-Style SOAP
- When to Use Which Style
- The Transport Binding Framework
- Using SOAP to Send Binary Data
- Small-Scale SOAP, Big-Time SOAP
- Summary
- Resources
Summary
We hope this chapter has demystified what SOAP is about and given you a good grounding in the essentials of the protocol and its behavior. You've seen how vertical (SOAP headers) and horizontal (intermediaries) extensibility, plus the binding framework, can be used to stretch the capabilities of the core in controlled ways. We'll return again and again to these extensibility concepts as we move through the examples in the rest of the book.
Of course, unless you plan to implement a SOAP engine on your own, you'll be using a toolkit to perform SOAP invocations. As such, we've also talked about Apache Axis, the open source SOAP engine that SkatesTown and SBC are using, and you've seen how the HTTP-based purchase order system can be converted into a SOAP Web service. You'll learn a lot more about Axis in Chapter 5, but before that we'll look at the other major pillar that makes up the foundation of Web services: the Web Service Description Language, or WSDL.