[Zope-dev] Web Services for Zope; what happened?

[Brian Lloyd]

> I'd like to know what happened to this proposal:
> <http://www.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/WebServicesForZope/FrontPage>
>
> Is the WebServices package (CVS) working? Any technical reason why it was
> discontinued?
>
> Thanks,
> Stefan

I'd still like to see that get finished one day. What happened is
that a) there are no paying customers driving continued development
and b) I haven't had any "extra time" to devote to it for a long
while.

Parts of it are working (see the unit tests for info). As for
technical reasons, the next big step is to parse and model
XML Schema info. There is not currently (or at least there wasn't
last I checked) a drop-in library for this that exposed what I
felt would be needed, and I definitely don't have the time to
implement one :)

An alternative would be to implement interfaces similar to what
Apache's Axis does (punt and let the programmer figure it out)
when faced with non-simple data types.

There are enough technologies (and constant changes to those
technologies) in the WS world that it requires real stakeholders,
people who use WS as a part of their "day job" to keep up
and manage a real-world usable Web Services package. Right now
I don't use WS in my day job, so I'm not that guy.

I've had a number of people inquire about the status of the package,
but so far no one willing to volunteer to move things forward. If
you (or anyone else) is interested, I'd be happy to provide any
guidance I can.



Brian Lloyd        brian@zope.com
V.P. Engineering   540.361.1716
Zope Corporation   http://www.zope.com