How to choose between SOAP and HTTP to access our web services?
One the first and most important decisions you need to make when accessing our services is whether your will use the SOAP protocol or the HTTP protocol: • Using HTTP requires little in terms of technology but can involve more programming. All you need is to make sure that your development environment lets you pull data from a url. If you can do that, you can use our services. You will receive an XML document that you will need to parse. This requires an XML parser and can be more arduous. • Using SOAP requires that you have a SOAP toolkit but is much easier to do. Many SOAP toolkits exist today in all environments. Most of them are free. Many environments also support SOAP natively (at least in their latest versions). A SOAP toolkit will be able to automatically ‘discover’ and ‘understand’ our web services. And instead of parsing XML documents, you will be working with classes (or objects, or complex types). This will make your work easier. This is why we recommend you use SOAP.
