How SOAP is better over other protocol

[Adit]

Hello Friends,

Can Any one tell me what is SOAP and how it is better than other protocol.It would be also helpful for me if you could tell the working of the SOAP.
Hope someone will help me.

Thanks in Advance!

[Allan.d]

Hi Adit,
Here i have explain what is SOAP and where it is used:

1. SOAP stands for "Simple Object Access Protocol"
2. SOAP is a communication protocol
3. SOAP is for communication between applications
4. SOAP is a format for sending messages
5. SOAP is designed to communicate via Internet
6. SOAP is platform independent
7. SOAP is language independent
8. SOAP is based on XML
9. SOAP is simple and extensible
10. SOAP allows you to get around firewalls
11. SOAP will be developed as a W3C standard

[Luther]

Why SOAP?

It is important for application development to allow Internet communication between programs.

Today's applications communicate using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) between objects like DCOM and CORBA, but HTTP was not designed for this. RPC represents a compatibility and security problem; firewalls and proxy servers will normally block this kind of traffic.

A better way to communicate between applications is over HTTP, because HTTP is supported by all Internet browsers and servers. SOAP was created to accomplish this.

SOAP provides a way to communicate between applications running on different operating systems, with different technologies and programming languages.


Microsoft and SOAP

SOAP is a key element of Microsoft's .NET architecture for future Internet application development.