What is the SOAP protocol?

W3C organization has made available a new web standard called SOAP, or Simple Object Access Protocol. Microsoft is also participating in the standard process.

SOAP provides a standard XML based format for sharing information and calling functions using HTTP protocol. Also SMTP can be used, but I would guess HTTP is the most popular choice.

A simple SOAP request in HTTP looks like this:

POST /MyService HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: text/xml

<soap:Envelope>
    <soap:Body>
        <GetTime>
        </GetTime>
    </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

The server processes the request and returns a SOAP response containing XML data. Because SOAP uses XML, applications written in different languages can exchange data using a common format.