One More Step Toward Transport Independence with Web Services

The initial SOAP spec was pretty tightly coupled with HTTP.  Shortly thereafter folks realized that this SOAP thing could apply to more than the HTTP request/response world.  Great steps had been made to remove the HTTP dependencies from the SOAP and other, higher-level specifications, but we haven't made much progress in terms of creating other bindings (there is a 2-year-old "Email Binding" which is still just a W3C Note). Well here is a great start: SOAP-over-UDP which was published today by .

As Martin mentions, this plays a big role in things like auto-discovery of devices (as demonstrated by a couple of the co-authors: Lexmark, Ricoh.  BEA is the other non-msft author).  I see it also being big in publish and subscribe message exchange patterns.  Probably the best part:  it is a very simple spec.

   -Matt