“With the recent submission of the Version 1.1 Specification of
the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to the W3C, the fledgling
new XML-messaging/rpc protocol has been getting a lot of attention
— mostly from developers wanting to know how exactly to use it in
their enterprise applications. Not wanting to disappoint, the two
largest supporters of SOAP, IBM and Microsoft, have both recently
released two vastly different (and unfortunately, incompatible)
reference implementations of SOAP.”
“When all is said and done, the Microsoft toolkit currently
works very well with SOAP implementations designed specifically
around its envelope encoding quirks and errors. However, this
doesn’t make the Microsoft toolkit very useful for developers
wanting to integrate with existing SOAP implementations on other
platforms.”
“I do, however, remain optimistic that the situation will get
better. Microsoft has put a lot of time and energy into SOAP and
has committed a good deal of resources to the task. The MS SOAP
toolkit will be improved over time. On the IBM side of things, the
recent news that the Apache Software Foundation has taken over the
SOAP For Java project means there is no doubt that the package will
only get better with time.”