[Zope-dev] SOAP support?

[Patrick Gerken]

On 1/7/07, Andreas Jung <lists at zopyx.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I think it would be time to support SOAP out-of-the-box in some way in
> Zope
> 2. XMLRPC is still a useful functionality but the whole world speak of
> web-services and Zope should support building web-services at least on the
> SOAP level. I am sure that would bring back some more attention to Zope as
> application-server.
>
> There are several SOAP related products available on zope.org. Does anyone
> know about their functionality, pros & cons? I know that there is also
> some
> SOAP support available for Plone/Archetypes (I think written by Benjamin
> Saller).
>
> Thoughts?


We implemented a soap service  one year ago, in the end, I was parsing the
incoming stream, and generated the soap messages by hand. The available
tools at that time were soappy with a zope2 wrapper and zsi <2.0
soappy was already in a stage where the developers said that they dont
maintain it any more, and people should use zsi. At that time zsi was mostly
dead, but some people were writing, there would be a new version soon. That
actually happened, but I never looked into that 2.0 version, because I could
read and write soap requests already. The old zsi looked very complicated,
and threw errors at my wsdl spec.

A bit off topic but I still want to throw it in:
If you have the freedom to decide whether you offer soap services or not,
please read these texts during your evaluation:
http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-stands-for-simple/
http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/whySoapSucks.html

Especially the strong typing bites us hard sometimes.



If I had to support a soap interface as a server, I would receive a wsdl
spec file, and would have to implement the message stubs, so for this part,
I would need a wsdl parser that creates method stubs.
If I would be a client, I would receive a wsdl spec file and would need a
wsdl parser that creates method stubs, that actually make type checks of
what I send.
In the real worlds I live in, it would not help to make every method
automatically available as a soap service, because there are ugly and subtle
impendance mismatches, for example, if you would want to transfer sets
instead of lists. It would be serious pita, to write a method so that it
adheres to a complex, given wsdl spec file, and that is probably most often
the case.
So maybe, soap support would just mean a good documentation of integration
of zsi generated code in your product code.

Best regards,

                Patrick Gerken
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/attachments/20070107/4cbd608e/attachment.htm