MTOM and MIME

SOAP-based web services can consume and return binary data.

General approaches to handling arbitrary binary data in SOAP-based web services:

• To encode data as base64 and transmit as the payload of the SOAP body.
• To transmit as one or more attachments of a SOAP message.

MTOM (Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism) is used to send and receive binary data without data encoding.