Member-only story
Note: The entire codebase for the application can be found here — https://github.com/mrsauravsahu/blog-modernizing-soap-apis
Introduction
The Internet is made up of a large number of interconnected systems, all running under various conditions — hardware, software, security, configuration, etc.,. Communication between these systems happens using various standards, which have evolved over time.
Throughout the years, there have been many protocols to standardize the exchange of information between systems over the Web. To name a few, these would be SOAP, RPC, REST, WebSockets, GraphQL, gRPC, etc.
SOAP
The Simple Object Access Protocol [source], as the name suggests, a simple protocol to help ease the exchange of structured information between two systems on the Internet.
SOAP uses XML (eXtensible markup language) format for requests and responses.
Back to 2023
It’s highly likely that you wouldn’t have come across SOAP at all incase all the systems you’re integrating with are fairly new, and provide a REST or GraphQL based API.
But if you’re working with legacy systems which provide only SOAP based APIs, this one’s for you.
