2.1 Transport

Protocol servers MUST support SOAP over HTTP or HTTPS.

All protocol messages MUST be transported by using HTTP bindings at the transport level.

Protocol messages MUST be formatted as specified in either [SOAP1.1] section 4 or [SOAP1.2-1/2007] section 5. Protocol server faults MUST be returned by using either HTTP status codes, as specified in [RFC2616] section 10, or SOAP faults, as specified in [SOAP1.1] section 4.4 or [SOAP1.2-1/2007] section 5.4.

If the HTTPS transport is used, a server certificate MUST be deployed.

This protocol MAY transmit an additional SOAP header, the ServiceContext header, as specified in [MS-SPSTWS].

This protocol does not define any means for activating a protocol server or protocol client. The protocol server MUST be configured and begin listening in an implementation-specific way. In addition, the protocol client MUST know the format and transport that is used by the protocol server, for example, the SOAP format over an HTTP transport.