Update on my “SOAP != HTTP POST” comment

Following the comments by Parand and his updated “Simple Recipe for SOAP Echo Service” entry, I just wanted to point out that it’s not that I didn’t like the proposed hack. It’s just that I didn’t agree with the statement that SOAP “is an HTTP POST containing XML, and an HTTP response containing XML” or that “SOAP is just XML over HTTP”.

I see what Parand proposes and I am all for it and also I understand why Mark agreed with the “XML over HTTP” part. However, my point was that SOAP cannot be equated with “XML over HTTP” (perhaps one could say that for the SOAP/HTTP binding but even then the message processing semantics defined by the SOAP spec would have been ignored). SOAP comes with a series of rules for message processing that help us compose various protocols in an interoperable fashion over arbitrary transports (yes Mark, I know… HTTP lets us do just that with all the one-application-protocol-to-rule-them-all love that comes with it 🙂

Ah… I missed these blogosphere discussions on WS, HTTP, REST, SOA… all the important things in life 🙂