News

SOAP 1.2 is good to go: W3C

• By Rich Seeley
• May 7, 2003

The W3C today announced that work on the SOAP 1.2 standard has been completed. Officials said the new spec is now a "Proposed Recommendation," the final step before adoption.

The new release is a significant advance over SOAP 1.0 and SOAP 1.1, and not just an enhancement as its 1.2 designation might indicate, said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C director, at the Gartner Web Services and Application Integration conference underway this week in Los Angeles.

"Starting today, developers who may have hesitated to pick up SOAP 1.2 should take a look," he stated during the formal unveiling of the new XML messaging standard. "After resolving over 400 issues -- including over 150 [issues] from SOAP 1.1 -- and delivering evidence of rigorous implementations, the W3C XML Protocol Working Group has produced for final review a real SOAP standard, SOAP 1.2."

The standard, as well as information on the seven implementations, is available for review on the W3C Website (www.w3.org). According to the announcement, the final review period ends June 7, at which time the new SOAP standard will be presented to W3C members for adoption.

SOAP 1.2 comes in two parts, a Messaging Framework and Adjuncts.

The Messaging Framework set rules for constructing and processing SOAP messages, as well as an extensibility framework so developers can use extensions inside and outside the SOAP envelope. It also includes rules for exchanging SOAP messages via protocols, including HTTP. The Adjuncts include sets of rules for remote procedure calls (RPCs), for encoding SOAP messages, for describing SOAP features and for SOAP bindings. It also sets a standard for binding SOAP to HTTP 1.1 so SOAP messages can be exchanged via the Web.