Web Services - Learn the XML

XML stands for "Extensible Markup Language" which is designed to transport and store the data. Following are some of main advantages of XML because of which XML fit for using in the Web Service data transport

Advantages Of XML:

• The First Benefit of XML is because we are writing you own markup there is no limited set of tags and user can choose appropriate names for the tags.
• As it is text based it is platform independent.
• Using XML anybody can design tags and have specific schema imposed on the XML to follow specific tags. In a way anybody can define the stranded for the XML.
  

Primary advantages of the XML for Web services that it allows programs written in different languages on different platforms to communicate with each other in a standards-based way. SOAP stands for "Simple Object Access Protocol" is the protocol which is written completely using the XML because of the above advantages, which is used in the communication using web services.

Simple Object Access Protocol:
SOAP once stood for "Simple Object Access Protocol", sometimes gets confused with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) protocol which is not true.SOAP is rely on the XML and SOAP envelope consists of SOAP header and SOAP body which is used for communicating with the web services.
Following is the example of the SOAP envelope