SOAP versus HTTP

Question

I read that webservice are transmitted through soap over http,,then what is the differnce between SOAP and HTTP,,though both are communication protocols.Is there any differnce or HTTP binding is used in soap?

Answer 1

It's not web services are transmitted. Rather, messages are transmitted in SOAP format.

SOAP being a protocol specification for exchanging structured information can use pretty much any transport protocol (HTTP being the most widely used, RPC and SMTP can be used as well).

Long story short, you cannot compare HTTP and SOAP since these are two orthogonal things. See Wikipedia for introduction.

Answer 2

Web services do not need to be implemented using SOAP, and SOAP does not actually need to be transmitted over HTTP (although this is pretty rare). HTTP is the underlying protocol of the web, while SOAP is one way of using XML as an envelope for RPC calls.

Answer 3

Http or Https is the protocol over witch SOAP runs.

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is meant for data exchange between servers.

client systems of soap are just other servers that connect to get data from the master server.

the oter option of soap is RPC (remote procedure call)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP

Answer 4

There are two main protocols related to webservices.

• 1st, transport protocols - e.g. http(commonly used), tcp, udp
• 2nd, messaging protocols - e.g. SOAP, XML, JSON or binary encoded messages

Generally speaking,

• Messaging protocols are responsible for exchanging the messages in a commonly agreed format.
• Transport protocols are responsible for delivering the messages and how it should communicate.

A real world example, HTTP is like telephone communication, SOAP is like English.

You call the web service over HTTP in SOAP messages such as you call your friend by mobile phone and talking in English.