News
W3C Releases SOAP Draft
- By Scott Bekker
- 07/10/2001
The World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) yesterday released a public working draft of version 1.2
of the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Although it features several new
enhancements to the SOAP 1.1 draft that preceded it, SOAP 1.2 is for the most
part a maintenance release.
SOAP, which
was originally created by Microsoft Corp. and submitted to the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) in late 1999, has evolved into a cross-platform
standard that has been embraced by most vendors as a means to facilitate the
seamless exchange of XML information.
SOAP is seen
as an important cog in an XML platform integration stack that includes not only
XML itself, but also a new business-to-business services standard called
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and another emerging
standard called the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
These
technologies promise to link business partners, customers and possibly even
competitors together over the Internet. In this paradigm, says Mike Schiff,
vice president of e-business and business intelligence with analyst firm Current Analysis XML and SOAP work
in tandem to enable companies to access the business-to-business services of
other companies without regard for platform considerations. Meanwhile, Schiff
continues, standards such as UDDI and WSDL provide core e-business description,
location and registration services, as well.
Among other
new features, SOAP 1.2 boasts compliance with W3C schema recommendations and
support for a new namespace. In addition, the SOAP 1.2 public draft also
provides recommendations for new error messages that can help developers to
more easily build interoperable applications.
According to
Current Analysis’ Schiff, the success of SOAP has been driven for the most part
by Microsoft’s willingness to turn it over to standards bodies like the IETF.
Schiff notes that the software giant has enjoyed other such successes in the
not-too-distant past, as well.
“What’s
important here is that once again it shows Microsoft’s ability to get out there
and try to establish dominance by establishing industry accepted standards,” he
comments. “They’ve done it with OLAP when they did it with Plato [the
integrated OLAP engine that shipped with SQL Server 7.0], they’re trying to do
it in data mining with the OLE DB for data mining standard.” –Stephen Swoyer
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.