In this article, the second of three, Dirk Reinshagen introduces SOAP to the XML messaging equation. He begins by describing SOAP and other related technologies, then reinforces with a simple example using SOAP to create an invoice.

In the movie Fight Club, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton play alter egos -- opposite ends of the psychological spectrum -- two guys trying to communicate with one another and having a tough time making it work. Interestingly enough -- and without giving away the punch line -- much of the action in the film revolves around the production of soap, an activity that seems to bind the characters in unique and unexpected ways.

In the XML zone's new opinion department, Benoît Marchal steps up on the soapbox to tell why SOAP is winning him over. SOAP's selling point is its simplicity, Marchal says. Because the new protocol builds on familiar technologies, in particular the Web server and XML, it's relatively easy for developers to design and deploy SOAP servers.

This article shows how to serialize a class into XML string.

This is an article about XML and one of the ways that you can generate XML. I had this project where the design was in the form of an 'n' tier and the application demanded that, the data should be displayed using XSLT. The input the XSLT is XML Data. All the Data for the project was stored in SQL Server 7.0 and we were supposed to retrive the data convert the data to XML and give it for further processing in the form of XSLT Transformation. We had to give out put in various level of hirearchy.

An article on object serialization in .NET

In this Soapbox opinion piece, Brett McLaughlin casts a critical eye on the Simple Object Access Protocol, assessing the value this much-discussed new technology can provide developers and demonstrating its foundation in a mixture of the old RPC (remote procedure calls) technology and in XML. Brett examines RPC, XML-RPC, RMI, and SOAP in detail, comparing and contrasting the use of each, and discusses whether SOAP makes sense. This article also includes sample code for a SOAP envelope.

Alex Nghiem (pictured, right) concludes his interview with Hugh Grant (left), CTO of Cape Clear, with a discussion of why SOAP proved to be more ubiquitous than XML-RPC. (Part 2 of 2)

Within the world of XML there are two main ways to implement a Remote Procedure Call (RPC). XML-RPC and SOAP. This document will explore the differences between these two methods in order to help you decide which is best suited to your needs.

An Introduction to SOAP

Microsoft has released two new tools which it said will enable developers to create web services more easily using existing internet technologies.

In the early days of the Internet, it was common for enlightened businesses to connect to it using SMTP, NTTP, and FTP clients and servers to deliver messages, text files, executables, and source code. The Internet became a more fundamental tool when businesses started to integrate their corporate information (both public and private) into the emerging Web framework. The Internet became popular when it shifted from a focus on transactional protocols to a focus on data objects and the links between them.

The last time ZSI was covered in this column, it was version 1.2. ZSI has enjoyed a recent spate of activity including the contributions for other developers besides the lead Rich Salz. It is now in version 1.4.1 and has added some WSDL support. Uche Ogbuji and Scott Archer take a look at these new developments and also discover a third-party wrapper option for ZSI.

In this article we will explore the options that you have when you want to add security to your web services

The Apache Cocoon framework excels at processing and manipulating XML documents, which makes it an easy and ideal platform for SOAP services. All the necessary components exist in the standard Cocoon release, except for one. This article introduces the XmlHttpTransformer, a component which allows mid-pipeline Cocoon elements to operate as SOAP clients retrieving information from external services. Two simple examples are presented with source code available.

With the mobile phone industry reporting better than expected sales, and news that, by the end of this year, smart phones are expected to outsell hand-held computers, it should come as no surprise that wireless application development is on the rise. Sun recently announced that by the end of 2004 there may well be more than 200,000,000 Java-enabled mobile handsets.