“Ximian is happy to announce the first release of Soup,
a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) implementation in C.SOAP is a generic RPC mechanism, which uses XML for data and
type encoding and is transferred over protocols such as HTTP and
SMTP. It is language and operating system agnostic, and very
lightweight.The immediate benefits to SOAP over other RPC mechanisms such as
CORBA or COM are that it functions well through firewalls and is
easily encryptable.Some of the more interesting aspects are SOAP’s rich type
system, built on the emerging XML Schema W3C spec, and the ability
to interoperate with other RPC mechanisms.”