The term Web Services is used in this documentation to describe any service that uses HTTP as its underlying transport mechanism. The Raritan Framework supports two basic types of Web Services - traditional Web Services based on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and other web services that use HTTP, including HTTP Request / XML response. These are handled in the Raritan Framework using a SearchServlet handler that can convert the HTTP request into a RTI search request and transform the result into the appropriate format required by the particular Web Service protocol.