Introduction
SOAP – Simple Object Access Protocol – is the hottest thing
in XML development right now. It has a major role to play in Microsoft’s next
generation of Visual Studio, and it is the basis of their “.NET” strategy. If
you’re looking to write a bullet-proof SOAP service now, in VB6, then look no
further than Microsoft’s SOAP toolkit for VB; but if you really want to understand
what SOAP is all about, then you need to get under the hood, and start building
your own objects around the SOAP standard. This article aims to get you started.
In the article, we will create a simple SOAP service, and a client to access
that service. The service will be in the form of an Active Server Page, which
I have called soap.asp - it will need to live in the root directory
of your Personal Web Service (by default c:\inetpub\wwwroot) Our service
will accept and process SOAP requests made by our client – a VB exe, with a
single module, and a start-up Sub Main().