What is SOAP?

SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It is an XML (Extensible Markup Language) based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined data types, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses. For more information see the W3C website http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group.