Oh, the irony, the Microsoft folks are busy singing the praises of WS-Addressing, for its transport independentness whilst their primary web services stack is for all practical purposes hopelessly tied to HTTP.
[Simon Fell > Its just code]
As of WS-I Basic Profile 1.0, Web Services are “hopelessly tied to HTTP”. It isn’t until you add in all the GXA Specifications that you start breaking up the marriage to HTTP (and the RPC Processing Model). Quoting from the WS-I spec:
SOAP 1.1 defines a single protocol binding, for HTTP. The Profile mandates the use of that binding
R2702 : A DESCRIPTION MUST use HTTP transport protocol with SOAP binding. Specifically, the transport attribute of soapbind:binding element MUST have the value “http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http”.
For interoperability the transport protocol is limited to HTTP. To permit secure transfers at the HTTP level use of HTTP(S) is allowed.
Additionally, the WSE toolkit is NOT tied to HTTP. One of the more interesting classes in the toolkit is SoapEnvelope. It’s an extension to XmlDocument that adds all the SOAP specific logic. So if you want to do web services w/o being tied to HTTP, WSE provides all the plumbing you need – just add the transport.