Related efforts Remote procedure calls in SOAP Remote procedure calls in SOAP are essentially client-server interactions over HTTP where the request and response comply with SOAP encoding rules. The SOAP message is an XML document whose root element, the Envelope, specifies the overall structure of the message, its intended recipient, and other attributes of the message. SOAP specifies a remote procedure call convention, which includes the representation and format to be used for calls and responses.
SOAP encoding rules specify the serialization for primitive and application-defined datatypes.
SOAP allows hierarchically structured queries and responses, and specifies serialization of primitive string, numeric and date datatypes, and aggregates like arrays and vectors. Sparse arrays, and protocols for sending parts of them are also supported. Overall, SOAP provides many advantages. Since a distinguishing characteristic of scientific computation is the need to handle large data sets, the performance of SOAP relative to specialized protocols that can use binary representations is an important issue. The next section tests SOAP performance relative to other communication protocols.