Editing SOAP (section)

==Technical critique ==
{{More citations needed section|date=August 2020}}

===  Advantages    ===
* SOAP's neutrality characteristic explicitly makes it suitable for use with any transport protocol. Implementations often use HTTP as a transport protocol, but other popular transport protocols can be used. For example, SOAP can also be used over SMTP, [[Java Message Service|JMS]]<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSEQTP_9.0.5/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/ae/rwbs_soapjmsstd.html |title=SOAP over JMS protocol |publisher=IBM |access-date=March 22, 2020 |archive-date=March 22, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200322212140/https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSEQTP_9.0.5/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/ae/rwbs_soapjmsstd.html |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.w3.org/2002/ws/soapjms/wiki/SOAP-JMS_FAQ |title=SOAP-JMS FAQ |publisher=SOAP-JMS Binding Working Group |access-date=March 22, 2020 |archive-date=July 17, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170717130309/https://www.w3.org/2002/ws/soapjms/wiki/SOAP-JMS_FAQ |url-status=live }}</ref> and [[message queue]]s.
* SOAP, when combined with HTTP post/response exchanges, tunnels easily through existing firewalls and proxies, and consequently doesn't require modifying the widespread computing and communication infrastructures that exist for processing HTTP post/response exchanges.
* SOAP has available to it all the facilities of XML, including easy internationalization and extensibility with XML Namespaces.

===Disadvantages===
* When using standard implementation and the default SOAP/HTTP binding, the XML infoset is serialized as XML. To improve performance for the special case of XML with embedded binary objects, the [[Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism]] was introduced.
* When relying on HTTP as a transport protocol and not using [[WS-Addressing|Web Services Addressing]] or an [[Enterprise Service Bus]], the roles of the interacting parties are fixed. Only one party (the client) can use the services of the other.
* SOAP is less "simple" than the name would suggest. The verbosity of the protocol, low parsing speed of XML, and lack of a standardized interaction model led to the dominance of services using the [[HTTP]] protocol more directly. See, for example, [[Representational state transfer|REST]].
* Being protocol-agnostic, SOAP is unable to take advantage of protocol-specific features and optimizations such as [[Representational state transfer#Uniform interface|REST's Uniform Interface]] or [[Web cache|caching]] – instead having to reimplement them (as with [[WS-Addressing]]).