Is SOAP suitable for use in CORBA natively, or is it only suitable for bridging across object domains?
SOAP is suitable for both. The SOAP transfer protocol provides a basic skeleton that can easily be extended and therefore take its place as an optional native CORBA protocol — by mapping GIOP to SOAP for example. Unlike GIOP, however, SOAP does not define any connection semantics and its encoding rules (serialization rules) are optional. However, SOAP’s basic XML format provides the means to bridge object models and transmit enterprise data using a language and object neutral representation.
