SOAP can be extended to perform the role of a transport protocol as well. This is achieved by binding SOAP messages to standard protocols.
A SOAP message needs to traverse from a sender to the receiver or from a client to the server and back. The mechanism of binding a SOAP message over transport protocols has been directly enabled by the SwA specification, which provides for a MIME structure. The benefit of encapsulating a SOAP message in a MIME structure is that the package is independent of the transport protocol. Therefore, a SOAP message can be bound to SMTP, HTTP, or FTP.
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