nn Traffic sniffing and stealing nn Denial-of-service attacks Additional problems and issues can occur, such as these: nn Firewall configuration and maintenance can be a hassle, and improper configuration can ultimately prohibit valid packets from reaching their host destination. SOAP is nearly unstoppable, utiliz- ing HTTP and port 80 to communicate. nn DCOM uses RPC to communicate and requires marshalling, thereby reducing efficiency. nn COM DLLs must be exported as .exe or .msi and distributed to the remote DCOM callers, so maintenance and updates can be a hassle. With SOAP, developers can focus more on architecting and developing scalable  solutions  and  concentrate  less  on  network  configuration  issues. SOAP  acts  as  a  service-level  provider,  allowing  you  to  expose  only  the methods that you want to expose over a secure, standard protocol. Special ports do not need to be opened for access as they do with RPC. The devel- oper is in complete control. The Microsoft SOAP Toolkit versus Built-in Support When  Microsoft  SOAP  Toolkit  was  released  in  1998,  its  main  objectives were  to  provide  experimental  capabilities  for  interoperability  between language-independent clients and to create Web services that leveraged a lightweight protocol requiring only a minimal amount of information to be carried across the wire and a minimal amount of effort to accomplish the mentioned tasks. Prior to the existence of SOAP calls, Action settings, Response.Redirect, and Server.Transfer calls on an ASP page forced the entire page to be sub- mitted to the Internet Information Server (IIS) for processing. If your inten- tions  were  to  navigate  to  an  entirely  new  page,  then  this  behavior  was acceptable. If your intentions were simply to update a field in a table on an otherwise static page, then this behavior was costly. Running entire pages through  IIS  for  processing  takes  time.  If  your  Web  application  utilizes DCOM objects, then you can expect some latency. ASP pages are fundamentally scripted, so the code was never compiled until the page was processed through IIS. Also, if out-of-process compo- nents were used, then they were referenced by the server in a just-in-time manner. Instancing those components took additional time. What Are Web Services? 11