SOAP History

SOAP web services are a standard way for businesses to communicate over a network. There have been precursors:Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), initially used by Unix systems, and Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), its Microsoft competitor. On a lower level, there is Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and, closer to our Java world, Remote Method Invocation (RMI). Before the Web, it was difficult to get all major software vendors to agree on a transport protocol. When the HTTP protocol became a mature standard, it gradually became a universal business medium of communication. At about the same time, XML officially became a standard when the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced that XML 1.0 was suitable for deployment in applications. By 1998, both ingredients, HTTP and XML, were ready to work together. SOAP 1.0, started in 1998 by Microsoft, was finally shipped at the end of 1999, and modeled typed references and arrays in XML Schema. By 2000, IBM started working on SOAP 1.1, and WSDL was submitted to the W3C in 2001. UDDI was written in 2000 by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) to allow businesses to publish and discover web services. With SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI in place, the de facto standards to create web services had arrived with the support of major IT companies.





Ref : Beginning of JavaEE 7