I used a SOAP service once, which had a single string-typed element. In that element went some XML, encoded as an XML string. I found out later that the origina

I used a SOAP service once, which had a single string-typed element. In that element went some XML, encoded as an XML string. I found out later that the original version used FTP drops, and all they did is wrap the FTP'd file as a string in the SOAP request. So no, sometimes there's very little difference between the two. FTP is just another way to send data over a network. I mean, you could even write a custom FTP server that read the file directly into processing instead of dropping it on a file system and reading it from there in some other process.