SOAP: Cross Platform Web Service Development Using XML

• Authors: Scott Seely;Kent Sharkey
• Venue: SOAP: Cross Platform Web Service Development Using XML
• Year: 2001

From the Book:ForewordAs long as there have been two computers, there has been difficulty getting them to communicate. Dozens, possibly hundreds, of strategies have arisen, each with their own strong and weak points. However, the end result is that still, it is difficult to get two computers to agree on a strategy for communication. Everyone wants everyone else to change to meet their strategy's needs. Thus, we end up with the "Communication Wars," CORBA vs. DCOM, DCOM vs. RMI, messaging vs. RPC, and so on.Into this tangled mass of communication comes SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). SOAP does not try to solve all problems; it only defines a simple, XML-based communication format. However, with this simple goal, and a powerful extensibility mechanism, SOAP bears the promise of being a true cross-everything communication protocol-cross-programming language, cross-operating system, cross-platform. As long as a computer, operating system, or programming language can generate and process XML (that is, text), it can make use of SOAP. Since the initial release, almost every major software vendor has either produced, or announced, an implementation of SOAP. We've seen standalone SOAP, SOAP built into Web servers, application servers, communication tools and even messaging middleware using SOAP. In the future, SOAP will become even more prevalent, as companies and organizations like Microsoft, IBM, Apache, and Sun add even more SOAP support to their applications, operating systems and programming languages.As the SOAP specification winds its way through the W3 standardization process, I'm certain that we will see changes. However, please don't let this stop youfrom experimenting and using SOAP in your applications. Yes, there will be changes, but these should be relatively minor, and each implementation should hide many of these details. I first "met" Scott because of a mailing list—DevelopMentor's excellent list devoted to SOAP discussions (http://discuss.develop.com/soap.html if you're interested in joining). There he tirelessly helped others understand what he obviously thought as an important technology. Therefore, I was glad to hear that he was also working on this book. He has packed a great deal of practical development advice into these pages. I also love the fact that he shows a variety of the implementations available, and that they are all communicating nicely.I hope that as you read this book, you see why Scott and I think SOAP is so important. So, whether you are a Java developer using the Apache implementation of SOAP, a VB developer using the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit, or a C# developer using .NET Web Services, or one of the many other implementations available, I hope that you join us in using SOAP in your applications. Perhaps together we can all learn to communicate.— Kent Sharkey.NET Frameworks Technical EvangelistMicrosoft Corporation