SOAP over HTTP or SMTP

The most common platform for the SOAP messaging is HTTP. This is because most services are made available on the Web. More importantly, the mechanisms by which HTTP works suit the structure of Soap request and response. Web is client server architecture and HTTP requests are sent to the server by the clients. Server in turn sends a HTTP response to the client. A simple and straight forward implementation of Web service messaging requirement is to embed the SOAP request within the body of HTTP request and a SOAP response within the body of HTTP response. This is referred to as SOAP over HTTP.

At times consumer of service has no control over how HTTP requests are processed. An example of this is if consumer is attempting to message the service from behind a firewall that is set up to reject the request. In addition request-response messaging may not be suitable for the particular application. An example of this is when processing takes longer than the default HTTP time out. Common HTTP request timeout is 300 seconds. Under these circumstances other means of sending and receiving the SOAP message have to be considered such as FTP (File transfer Protocol) or SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).

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