Simple Object Access Protocol: A Step-By-Step Approach
SOAP—Simple Object Access Protocol—is the hottest thing in XML development right now. It has a major role to play in Microsoft's next generation of Visual Studio, and it is the basis of their .NET strategy. If you're looking to write a bullet-proof SOAP service now, in VB6, then look no further than Microsoft's SOAP toolkit for VB; but if you really want to understand what SOAP is all about, then you need to get under the hood, and start building your own objects around the SOAP standard. This article aims to get you started.
by Syd Egan
September 1, 2001
n the article, we will create a simple SOAP service, and a client to access that
service. The service will be in the form of an Active Server Page, which I have
called soap.asp—it will need to live in the root directory of your Personal Web Service
(by default c:\inetpub\wwwroot\) Our service will accept and process SOAP
requests made by our client—a VB exe, with a single module, and a start-up Sub
Main().
As we know, SOAP is a call-response
mechanism, which operates in a client-server paradigm. The client (your
application) makes a call to the server (a web server, somewhere on the
internet), passing in parameters; and the server provides a response.
Both call and response are transported in the form of XML documents. Therefore,
to build our own example SOAP system, we need both a client and a server—a caller
and a responder.
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n the article, we will create a simple SOAP service, and a client to access that
service. The service will be in the form of an Active Server Page, which I have
called soap.asp—it will need to live in the root directory of your Personal Web Service
(by default c:\inetpub\wwwroot\) Our service will accept and process SOAP
requests made by our client—a VB exe, with a single module, and a start-up Sub
Main().
