Xmlrpc and soap, looking for a simple answer to a simple question

Question

Hello,
Can someone tell me, are java implementations of web service protocols such as soap and xmlrpc built around servlets (and supporting classes of course) that know how to deal with these specific xml formats? I know there are various libraries for handling these things but on the most basic level it's still using a Servlet as an end point for an http request and then handing out the request to the supporting classes isn't it?
thanks a bunch
-seth

Answer 1

XML-RPC and SOAP were developed outside of Sun, outside of Java. They are uniform international standards of communications developed on top of XML standards to be easily used by applications of different types.
XML, like Java, is cross-platform, but for applications. XML defines document structure, and because it is an international standard, many people have access to the "format." An application, like Microsoft Word, can read an XML document created by some other Application that is written in XML because both understand XML. Although they can read the document, they may not understand the data. Various other XML technologies enable the application to retrieve another XML document that describes the elements or that defines how the data is to be displayed and/or used. XML Style Sheets and XML Translations are just two such things.
Not everyone knows the Adobe PDF format, so a program like MS Word is not able to read it, but if it was written in XML, then Word could read the document, get the technology that describes how to handle the data, and then properly display it to the user, allow editing, then save it back into XML format, and then Acrobat could read the edited data and display it correctly as well. Two different applications, one common format.