W3C: "SOAP is a lightweight protocol for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It is an XML based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined datatypes, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses."
The structure of a SOAP message is:
[SOAP message (XML document)
[SOAP envelope
[SOAP header?
element*
]
[SOAP body
(element* | Fault)?
]
]
]
This chapter contains the following sections: