John Bristowe

Developers wanting to expose applications beyond proprietary runtime environments like the CLR should utilize XML Web services. XML Web services facilitate application-to-application interoperability across heterogeneous environments. Coupled with numerous standards and specifications, XML Web services form the basis of a highly distributed computing model. At the heart of this model lies the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). SOAP defines a simple and extensible XML-based messaging framework that can be targeted by a variety of different programming models and over variety of different transport protocols. The fact that SOAP messages are represented in XML raises a number of concerns when transmitting sensitive data across the wire. While existing transport protocols like SSL/TLS can address some of these concerns, they do not provide a solution that will work ... (more)