Glossary
This glossary contains some of the more commonly used terms relating to online bookstores, website hosting and content management systems. You may also find our Websites Glossary, Search Assistance Glossary Consulting Glossary useful.
SOAP
SOAP, originally defined as
Simple Object Access Protocol, is a
protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of
Web Services in
computer networks. It relies on
Extensible Markup Language (XML) as its message format, and usually relies on other
Application Layer protocols (most notably
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and
HTTP) for message negotiation and transmission. SOAP can form the foundation layer of a
web services protocol stack, providing a basic messaging framework upon which web services can be built.
XML
XML (
Extensible Markup Language) is a general-purpose
specification for creating custom
markup languages.
[1] It is classified as an
extensible language, because it allows the user to define the mark-up elements. XML's purpose is to aid information systems in sharing structured data, especially via the
Internet,
[2] to encode documents, and to
serialize data; in the last context, it compares with text-based serialization languages such as
JSON,
YAML, and
S-Expressions.