MTOM is the
W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...
''Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism'', a method of efficiently sending binary data to and from
Web service
A web service (WS) is either:
* a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or
* a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...
s.
MTOM is usually used with the
XOP (XML-binary Optimized Packaging).
Application
MTOM only optimizes element content that is in the canonical lexical representation of the xs:base64Binary data type. Since there is no standard way to indicate whether data is in the canonical lexical representation, the mechanism for applying MTOM is implementation-dependent.
The use of MTOM is a hop-by-hop contract between one SOAP node and the next. There is no guarantee that the optimization will be preserved if there are multiple SOAP nodes involved.
Details
Although most users treat MTOM as a single mechanism, the MTOM specification defines it as three related features:
* Firstly, an "Abstract SOAP Transmission Optimization Feature" for sending and receiving SOAP messages that contain binary data. The binary data is a part of the single XML Infoset model, but this feature introduces the concept of sending the binary data separately (i.e. not in the serialized XML infoset). This abstract feature does not define how the serialized XML infoset looks without the binary data, nor how the binary data is actually represented.
* Secondly, an "Optimized MIME Multipart/Related Serialization of SOAP Messages" is defined. This defines that the serialized XML infoset will include
XML-binary Optimized Packaging (XOP) in place of the binary data, and the binary data (along with the serialized XML infoset with XOP placeholders) will be represented together in a
MIME
A mime artist, or simply mime (from Greek language, Greek , , "imitator, actor"), is a person who uses ''mime'' (also called ''pantomime'' outside of Britain), the acting out of a story through body motions without the use of speech, as a the ...
container. Although this defines a SOAP message, it does not define the transport protocol over which that MIME and XOP SOAP message is sent.
* Thirdly, a "HTTP SOAP Transmission Optimization Feature" defines how the above MIME and XOP SOAP message is sent over
HTTP
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...
.
Sometimes the term "MTOM" is used as a shorthand to mean "MTOM with XOP". XOP is used as the referencing mechanism in the serialised XML infoset. In theory, the abstract MTOM model could be used with a different referencing mechanism or different container format; also, MTOM could be used over a different transport protocol instead of HTTP. In practice, MTOM is usually used with XOP, MIME and HTTP.
See also
*
SOAP
Soap is a salt (chemistry), salt of a fatty acid (sometimes other carboxylic acids) used for cleaning and lubricating products as well as other applications. In a domestic setting, soaps, specifically "toilet soaps", are surfactants usually u ...
*
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...
*
Web service
A web service (WS) is either:
* a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or
* a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...
External links
W3C's SOAP Message Transmission Optimization MechanismW3C's XML-binary Optimized Packaging
{{W3C standards
World Wide Web Consortium standards