It is important for web applications to be able to communicate over the Internet.
The best way to communicate between applications is over HTTP, because HTTP is supported by all Internet browsers and servers. SOAP was created to accomplish this.
SOAP provides a way to communicate between applications running on different operating systems, with different technologies and programming languages.
- SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol
- SOAP is an application communication protocol
- SOAP is a format for sending and receiving messages
- SOAP is platform independent
- SOAP is based on XML
- SOAP is a W3C recommendation
- SOAP is also a request-/response-based protocol.
- SOAP can be transported using SMTP, HTTP and other protocols.
- SOAP traffic via HTTP can be encrypted and compressed just like other HTTP requests.
- Requires the LIBXML extension (Enabled by default in PHP)
- SOAP Clients in PHP are hiding the complexity of sending
a request to a remote SOAP Server and processing the
response