SOAP

Assume that in our starring role of Leonardo we've tired of all the backflips that TLS and the security taskmasters require us to preform just to get a secure message to our leige, King Francis I, and we've decided that instead of looking up the King's certificate, the Uffizi's certificate, getting our certificate,...we just want to take a few days off, travel to the King's castle and get in some QT, quality time, with the man as we haven't really talked mano-et-mano for years. In the midst of this business-cum-vacation, we can slip the the King-man a copy of our private key for our symmetric cipher. With this we can dispense with the three-ring circus associated with the security Gestapo.

The only problem is that we now need to reserve a flight and book a hotel for our stay in Paris. Oh, the problems of modern life! To jump this next little hurdle Leonardo, i.e. you, decide to use an internet based travel-booking system. We'll next examine how to do so using SOAP.

So, Leonardo, i.e. you, has got it in his head that he wants to use this SOAP stuff, not to wash his new Ferrari, but to book a flight and reserve a room in Paris. This can't be the same soap I'm thinking of. What is it?

From the Good Book of SOAP:

SOAP is a lightweight protocol intended for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It uses XML technologies to define an extensible messaging framework providing a message construct that can be exchanged over a variety of underlying protocols.

In English this time? SOAP is a language used for exchanging messages. This language is based off of an XML schema and also contains various ``extension points'' which allow for the addition of new vocabulary and grammatical constructs. In addition these messages can be transmitted over a number of protocols HTTP, HTTPS, ...That's a head-full; with all this double-talk in mind, one can see that we need to tease out more of the details of this newfangled SOAP thing before we can use it to book a flight, reserve a room, or much less wash a Ferrari.

• SOAP Messages
• SOAP RPC Representation
• Leonardo Da Vinci's Airplane Tickets