Description:SOAP (Simple Object Access protocol) is an XML-based messaging protocol for creating distributed Web applications. In plain English: it solves a basic business problem, which is creating Web applications that have to talk with servers that are running on different platforms (Windows, Unix, Linux and so on). SOAP offers an XML-based method to pass business data for e-commerce applications through corporate firewalls. Java is an effective language to use for SOAP programming because it works so well with XML. This text provides a guide to SOAP for Java developer's. The accompanying CD-ROM includes all the sample code from the book, sample applications, a collection of SOAP-related code and tools, the IBM/Apache and DevelopMentor implementations of SOAP for Java, and the Sun Tomcat Java 2 Enterprise Edition server.