What is meant by a transport independent/dependent protocol?

Question

I am a beginner in web services and network protocols. I have come across a term called "transport independent" as in "SOAP is known as a transport-independent messaging protocol".

I googled a lot of sites, but I could not find an appropriate explanation for the same ? Could anyone explain me what the term means ?

Thanks in advance..

Answer 1

Would like to put my understanding as simple to the help the question. Web service is typically to provide the communication between two or more applications. Two or more systems means, they do have there own run time and those run times can be in any platform and built on different languages. In a scenario they communicate each other by exchanging data. REST and SOAP are the web services uses existing communication layers like HTTP, FTP, etc.. and REST work on HTTP and SOAP is uses any (transport independent) that available but most of the applications use HTTP. How we can configure communication protocol in case of SOAP? Each language has its own support in doing so. Would like hear more on this.

Answer 2

The transport layer of a protocol stack is the layer that deals with the transfer of information between processes, often on different computers.

Common transport protocols used on the web are HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP etc.

Many of these transport protocols have features built in such as security, compression, encryption etc.

SOAP has been implemented to have all the required features built-in in a self contained way. So although there are bindings for SOAP over HTTP, it is not a requirement that SOAP has to use HTTP.

In other words SOAP is a transport-independent messaging protocol