Benefits of SOAP Over Other Architectures

• SOAP is an open standard that is built upon open technologies such as XML and HTTP. It is not vendor-specific and therefore less intimidating to smaller players in the industry. As a result it is being accepted uniformly by the industry, thus improving its chances of being the de-facto standard for true distributed interoperability.
• Even though the initial systems for SOAP were built using HTTP as the transport protocol, SOAP can be used over any other protocol. The SOAP specification does not mandate any particular transport protocol. This gives SOAP the opportunity to consolidate various protocols such as IIOP and RMI into a single specification, thus improving usability and interoperability.
• SOAP based systems are very easy to deploy. They require minimal amount of setup and the enabling of a port for the transport protocol being used.
• SOAP based distributed systems are loosely-coupled. As a result they are easier to maintain because they can be modified independently of other systems.
• Unless major serialization changes are made to the SOAP specification in the future, the applications that are written will not be negatively impacted.
• When used over HTTP protocol, SOAP packets can easily bypass firewalls if their content is not deemed malicious. This is a major limitation in competing distributed protocols which are not firewall friendly.

SOAP also has some limitations in terms of security and synchronization.

• Since SOAP is a protocol, not a system, it does not address security. While it is very desirable to bypass the firewall woes experienced by competing distributed architectures, it is imperative that the security concerns around SOAP be resolved before it can be expected to gain predominance in the marketplace.
• All SOAP data is serialized and passed by value and currently there is no provision for passing data by reference. This could lead to synchronization problems if multiple copies of the same object are being passed at the same time.