SOAP / REST

Its worth taking a look at this:

http://www.w3schools.com/soap/soap_intro.asp

I think SOAP meets our needs nicely and if the API's in .Net and Java are good then we should use this over REST.

A SOAP message is entirely XML, has really good support for error messages (http://www.w3schools.com/soap/soap_fault.asp), supports headers for info relating to the message, supports optional/required headers, and lots of other stuff we dont need.

It will be fairly straight forward to take some XML content and insert it into the body of a SOAP request.

Some other rules I stole from w3schools:

• A SOAP message MUST be encoded using XML
• A SOAP message MUST use the SOAP Envelope namespace
• A SOAP message MUST use the SOAP Encoding namespace
• A SOAP message must NOT contain a DTD reference
• A SOAP message must NOT contain XML Processing Instructions