"As I mentioned we'll think of web services as a client and a server program exchanging SOAP formatted messages over the Internet (or an intranet)"
This is the statement i got confused , can't i send an XML document to the servlet which parses and does something with it and returns the XML document in response .
Whats the thing i will be missing when does the above than using SOAP protocol ?
"Writing a program that takes some data, formats it as a SOAP message using basic API's and finally sends it to a server is not very interesting to most programmers. And the reverse operation: receiving the SOAP message and extracting the data in it is just as boring. It's a pure technical thing and has nothing to do with business programming. The good thing is that Axis does all the technical stuff for us"