SOAP and OCP

Abbie Barbir argued that OPES processors should support SOAP as a
foundation of OCP. Abbie, I think it is time to resume that discussion
in the OCP transport light/scope. I have three basic questions:

        1. SOAP is not a transport protocol. Would you
           require a specific transport protocol to
           be used if OCP is implemented using SOAP?
           For example, would you require that BEEP/TCP and
           only BEEP/TCP is used under SOAP?

        2. My understanding is that using SOAP pretty
           much requires XML message format/encoding for
           OCP messages. How do you suggest we implement
           OCP data pipeline with SOAP? More specifically,
           what is the best way to transfer, say, a 900KB
           "binary" stream from OPES processor to callout server?
           Single large SOAP message? Multiple small messages?
           How to encode binary data?

        3. Does SOAP allow for SOAP "connections" that are
           mapped to transport connections of some kind?
           If we do not have access to transport connections,
           how do we keep state and avoid constant
           renegotiations? How do we guarantee that two
           messages to the same callout server IP address
           end up at the same server (as opposed to being
           NATed or load-balanced to different servers)? Do
           we care about IP not being sufficient to identify
           a real server?

Thanks,

Alex.