[Webdev] PHP & SOAP

[Dermot McGahon]

>>>>> "Niall" == Niall O Broin <niall at magicgoeshere.com> writes:

[-]

    Niall> I had a quick glance and I'm just idly curious - is this
    Niall> SOAP an ASN.1 for the 21st century ?

Not exactly. It has a selection of allowed data types but if you think
of ASN.1 being used as part of a larger RPC based middleware scheme
then you are closed to what SOAP is.

The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a developement of XML-RPC
which has been around for a couple of years. The basic premise is to
use RPC request/response with XML as the data type. In reality
everyone uses http to transfer the packets (or bars as they are called
colloquially) from machine to machine. You can use any transport you
want but seeing as port 80 is already open people shove anything then
can down it.

A SOAP bar consists of an envelope which specifies which remote method
should be called, a header which is used for all the bits that were
forgotten about when the standard was being developed and a body which
contains the message itself in XML format.

It's a very simple protocol really and is used instead if IIOP
(Corba), WDDX (Web distributed data exchange) or any of the other
fifteen proposed methods for XML interchange currently being looked at
by W3C. I have a bunch of bookmarks on this stuff (what is the proper
plural term for bookmarks?) but I'm at a different machine today but
ask if you want to know more. Does anyone have a good solution for
that BTW, bookmarks getting scattered around different machines ?

Regards,

Dermot.
--