SOAP gains industry support

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
Network World, 05/15/00

A new Web-based messaging format, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), is picking up endorsements left and right. IBM and subsidiary Lotus Development have thrown in their support, as have Microsoft, Ariba, Commerce One, Compaq and Intel.

SOAP could become a key component of e-commerce applications because it provides a simple way for Web sites to communicate with one another to provide services seamlessly to end users. For example, a visitor to a company's Web site could get a real-time stock quote from a financial Web site, or a buyer could get a parts list from a supplier's Web site.

The Web sites need not share the same operating system, application software or programming language, as long as they use SOAP for server-to-server communications.

"For e-business and e-commerce to succeed, every business is going to have to be able to talk to every other business," says Noah Mendelsohn, an IBM distinguished engineer at Lotus. "Some of the lower-level capability is already there on the Internet with TCP/IP. What SOAP resolves is another layer of agreement on top of that."

SOAP is based on two Internet standards: XML for data encoding and HTTP for message transport. Version 1.1, which shipped at the end of last month, adds support for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, FTP and TCP/IP.

SOAP will likely be implemented in Web development tools, Web server software and e-commerce applications as early as this year. IBM is offering an alpha version of a SOAP processor that works with its Websphere software on its Web site.

It is unclear how SOAP will move toward standardization. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published an informational document about SOAP last fall. SOAP also is one of a dozen XML protocols the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is tracking.

In fact, SOAP is expected to be one of the hottest topics at the Ninth International World Wide Web Conference in Amsterdam this week. The W3C is hosting a panel to explore XML-based network protocols such as SOAP, the Web Distributed Authoring Protocol and the Internet Open Trading Protocol.

"There's been a lot of interest in both our group and in the IETF to try to build an activity around [XML protocol issues]," says W3C spokeswoman Janet Daly. "There's a real need for a protocol that's lean and lightweight but that's also robust, stable and can handle large-scale e-commerce application demands."

"The next step is to get SOAP a home in one of the standards bodies," agrees Bob Sutor, IBM's program director for XML technology. "We expect that to be decided within the next month or so."