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I'm sorry to ask this question but I have spent hours trying to understand where each one of them fits in in a web service. I just can't wrap my head around what do I need to use to create a web service.

I know that web service can be .Net or Java or PHP based. Say I want to create a web service in .NET using C#. When do SOAP, XML-RPC or JSON come into picture?

Thank you!

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    This is a very broad question and as such may end up being closed for not being specific enough for this site. It would be better if you reviewed the tag wiki entries for SOAP, XML-RPC and JSON and then asked more specific questions. Commented Jun 30, 2012 at 2:06

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JSON is a standard to represent human-readable data. It merely represents data, nothing more.

SOAP is a protocol specification for transmiting information and calling web services, and uses XML to encode it. SOAP works over HTTP (amogst other network protocols).

XML-RPC is another protocol, used for transmiting information and calling remote procedures. It doesn't run over HTTP, but is rather a different protocol, different port, etc.

So the main difference between SOAP and XML-RPC that the former wraps inside HTTP, while the latter does not. JSON is something completely different.

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Thanks. So if I create a .NET web service in C#, I'm guessing it will use SOAP for transmitting information and XML as the data format?
That's right. SOAP is also a well-defined standard that works across plenty of different languages, so your clients don't need to be C#, since they're basically XML files wrapped in HTTP. I belive the same stands true for XML-RPC.
Great! Do I need to know anything about SOAP to write a web service? I saw some tutorials for creating .NET web services in Visual Studio but SOAP was never mentioned.
Nope, I've no idea to anything .NET related. If you can't find anything helpful, another question might be the answer.

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