Best soap tutorials

Question

I am looking to start a project that will involve the use of soap quite extensively. However... I know nothing about it! I was wondering if the community here could point me towards a few of the choicer tutorials on the net instead of having to wade through countless sub-par search results. And when I say I know nothing about it, I mean I know that its like an online api to some extent, but really that is it. Thanks!

This would be used in conjunction with an android app, so I suppose I should also ask if android sdk even supports soap/ is this even a valid question? I really am clueless here.

Answer 1

A great place to start is Wikipedia. Gives some great fundamental information.

Also though you may want to look at REST instead if you are not going to consume existing SOAP-based Web Services.

Answer 2

SOAP is a protocol, not an API; that is, it is an XML format for wrapping text (i.e. not binary) content. It is basically an agreed-upon xml format that can be implemented on different platforms to construct and parse packages containing text data.

There is no native support for SOAP in the Android platform, but check out this prior post, it links to the ksoap2-android library, which is a third-party Android library to assist in working with SOAP.

This StackOverflow post details some specific usage of the library and may be a useful reference as well.