Why SOAP?

SOAP is important for application development to allow Internet communication between programs.

Instead of SOAP we are also using RPC (Remote procedure call) for object DCOM, COM etc.. But HTTP was not designed for this. RPC represents compatibility and security problems; firewall and proxy server is blocking this kind of traffic.

SOAP is a better way to communicate between applications over HTTP, because HTTP is supported by all internet browsers and servers.

SOAP is platform independent and language independent means it can communicate between applications running on different operating system, with different technology and programming languages.