What is the difference between SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, HTTP GET & HTTP POST methods for Android?

Karthik picture Karthik · Dec 21, 2011 · Viewed 107.6k times · Source

I am working on a code for SOAP Web services, I would like to know the variations in SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, HTTP GET & HTTP POST methods for Android, and which is the preferred one among them. Please site out a sample of its usage URL or its code.

Thanks

Answer

Nikunj Patel picture Nikunj Patel · Dec 21, 2011

Differences in SOAP versions

Both SOAP Version 1.1 and SOAP Version 1.2 are World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. Web services can be deployed that support not only SOAP 1.1 but also support SOAP 1.2. Some changes from SOAP 1.1 that were made to the SOAP 1.2 specification are significant, while other changes are minor.

The SOAP 1.2 specification introduces several changes to SOAP 1.1. This information is not intended to be an in-depth description of all the new or changed features for SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2. Instead, this information highlights some of the more important differences between the current versions of SOAP.

The changes to the SOAP 1.2 specification that are significant include the following updates: SOAP 1.1 is based on XML 1.0. SOAP 1.2 is based on XML Information Set (XML Infoset). The XML information set (infoset) provides a way to describe the XML document with XSD schema. However, the infoset does not necessarily serialize the document with XML 1.0 serialization on which SOAP 1.1 is based.. This new way to describe the XML document helps reveal other serialization formats, such as a binary protocol format. You can use the binary protocol format to compact the message into a compact format, where some of the verbose tagging information might not be required.

In SOAP 1.2 , you can use the specification of a binding to an underlying protocol to determine which XML serialization is used in the underlying protocol data units. The HTTP binding that is specified in SOAP 1.2 - Part 2 uses XML 1.0 as the serialization of the SOAP message infoset.

SOAP 1.2 provides the ability to officially define transport protocols, other than using HTTP, as long as the vendor conforms to the binding framework that is defined in SOAP 1.2. While HTTP is ubiquitous, it is not as reliable as other transports including TCP/IP and MQ. SOAP 1.2 provides a more specific definition of the SOAP processing model that removes many of the ambiguities that might lead to interoperability errors in the absence of the Web Services-Interoperability (WS-I) profiles. The goal is to significantly reduce the chances of interoperability issues between different vendors that use SOAP 1.2 implementations. SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ) can also stand alone as a simple mechanism to issue SOAP requests. A major change to the SAAJ specification is the ability to represent SOAP 1.1 messages and the additional SOAP 1.2 formatted messages. For example, SAAJ Version 1.3 introduces a new set of constants and methods that are more conducive to SOAP 1.2 (such as getRole(), getRelay()) on SOAP header elements. There are also additional methods on the factories for SAAJ to create appropriate SOAP 1.1 or SOAP 1.2 messages. The XML namespaces for the envelope and encoding schemas have changed for SOAP 1.2. These changes distinguish SOAP processors from SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2 messages and supports changes in the SOAP schema, without affecting existing implementations. Java Architecture for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) introduces the ability to support both SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2. Because JAX-RPC introduced a requirement to manipulate a SOAP message as it traversed through the run time, there became a need to represent this message in its appropriate SOAP context. In JAX-WS, a number of additional enhancements result from the support for SAAJ 1.3.

There is not difine POST AND GET method for particular android....but all here is differance

GET The GET method appends name/value pairs to the URL, allowing you to retrieve a resource representation. The big issue with this is that the length of a URL is limited (roughly 3000 char) resulting in data loss should you have to much stuff in the form on your page, so this method only works if there is a small number parameters.

What does this mean for me? Basically this renders the GET method worthless to most developers in most situations. Here is another way of looking at it: the URL could be truncated (and most likely will be give today's data-centric sites) if the form uses a large number of parameters, or if the parameters contain large amounts of data. Also, parameters passed on the URL are visible in the address field of the browser (YIKES!!!) not the best place for any kind of sensitive (or even non-sensitive) data to be shown because you are just begging the curious user to mess with it.

POST The alternative to the GET method is the POST method. This method packages the name/value pairs inside the body of the HTTP request, which makes for a cleaner URL and imposes no size limitations on the forms output, basically its a no-brainer on which one to use. POST is also more secure but certainly not safe. Although HTTP fully supports CRUD, HTML 4 only supports issuing GET and POST requests through its various elements. This limitation has held Web applications back from making full use of HTTP, and to work around it, most applications overload POST to take care of everything but resource retrieval.

Link to original IBM source