HTTP is the World Wide Web (www) protocol for information exchange. HTTP is based on character-oriented streams and is firewall-friendly. Hence, we can also exchange XML streams (which are XML encoded character streams) over HTTP. In a web service we exchange XML in the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) format over HTTP. Hence, the HTTP headers exchanged will be slightly different than a normal web page interaction. A sample web service request header is shown as follows:

GET /AxisEndToEnd/services/HelloWebService?WSDL HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Java/1.6.0-rc
Host: localhost:8080
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2
Connection: keep-alive
POST /AxisEndToEnd/services/HelloWebService HTTP/1.0
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Accept: application/soap+xml, application/dime, multipart/related, text/*
User-Agent: Axis/1.4
Host: localhost:8080
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
SOAPAction: ""
Content-Length: 507

The first line contains a method, a URI and an...