Welcome to the first part of my 3 series articles on developing SOAP based applications using Java. This series is not a detailed description of SOAP protocol but just a quick-start tutorial to demonstrate how we can use Java and SOAP together.

In the fist part I will cover the basic anatomy of SOAP, the installation of Apache SOAP 2.2 and configuration issues with Jakarta Tomcat 3.2.1 and develop, deploy and execute a very basic SOAP application. In part 2 of the series, I will develop a more complex Java bean based SOAP service and in part 3, I will give you an idea about other complex aspects of SOAP. Right then, lets begin.

Anatomy of SOAP

Simple Object Access Protocol or SOAP is basically designed to provide a very simple and lightweight mechanism to exchange structured information in a decentralised and distributed environment. It is in essence a model for encoding data in a standardised XML format to be used in a variety of situations such as Messaging and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). The SOAP consists of three essential parts:

• Envelope: This is the top level XML element or the root element in a XML encoded SOAP message. Envelope contains or may necessarily contain the following information such as: the recipient of the message, the content of the message and the processing instruction of the message.
• Encoding rules: The encoding rules specify the way that the application defined data-type instances will be exchanged.
• RPC: The Remote Procedure Call or RPC representations define a convention for representing the Remote Procedure Calls and the Responses to them.

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