What IS SOAP

So How Do We Develop a SOAP Application?

There are many SOAP toolkits available which make SOAP application development seem like a breeze. Some wellknown toolkits are MS SOAP Toolkit, IBM Web Services Toolkit and SOAP:Lite. In this tutorial, we have focussed on development with Apache SOAP v2.2.

In order to develop a complete SOAP application (Client and Server), you will need the following:

A web server (Apache Tomcat)
SOAP Toolkit (Apache SOAP)
An XML Parser (Xerces. Note: This is sometimes included with your toolkit)

You can visit SoapUser.com for detailed instructions on installing and running the above components

There are two components to a SOAP application: the Client and the Server. Both the client and the server side applications can be developed in two ways:

Message-based and
RPC-based.

Message-based applications involve writing the xml request and response packets directly to the wire, while RPC applications use web services to make methods 'callable' over the net. In this tutorial we will demonstrate an implementation of the RPC-SOAP mechanism.

Next --> So How Do We Develop A SOAP Server??