HTTP and SOAP nodes can both be used to interact with Web services. Typically you use SOAP nodes when working with SOAP-based Web services.
For SOAP-based Web services, several advantages exist if you use the SOAP nodes and the SOAP message domain instead of the HTTP transport nodes and XMLNSC message domain.
- Support for WS-Addressing, WS-Security and SOAP headers.
- A common SOAP logical tree format, independent of the bitstream format.
- Runtime checking against WSDL.
- Automatic processing of SOAP with Attachments (SwA).
- Automatic processing of Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM).
Although the HTTP nodes can process SwA messages, you must use the MIME message domain and design your flow to handle the attachments explicitly, and use custom logic to extract and parse the SOAP.
Cases where it might be better to use HTTP nodes include:
- Message flows that interact with Web services that use different standards, such as REST or XML-RPC.
- Message flows that never use WS-Addressing, WS-Security, SwA, or MTOM.