[Zope] status of SOAP for Zope?

[Brian Lloyd]

> Okay, has anything been done at all?
> 
> Where would I start? What's left to do?


Petru Paler contributed some preliminary work:

http://classic.zope.org:8080/Collector/1360/view

While I think that this is a good thing and I'm glad he did it, 
I think that experience has shown that just suddenly making 
*everything* available via a new protocol (xml-rpc, SOAP) is 
not really the right approach. There are a number of people 
who have recently voiced their (legitimate) concern that by 
default *practically everything* on their site is xml-rpc 
enabled - and they have no easy way to turn it off or make 
things selectively available.

This is a very important point - I think people would rather 
be able to implement SOAP services selectively rather than 
by One Big Switch that may expose just about anything. I would 
very much like to see a project started on dev.zope.org that 
starts off by drafting a "user manual" that describes how SOAP 
services would be implemented from the standpoint of a Zope 
developer. This would give us a good way to come to agreement 
without worrying about code just yet. 

Some attention should be given to how SOAP services get exposed by 
other systems at this point (they do *not* just suddenly expose 
every in-memory object to SOAP). We should also anticipate some 
of the work being done in "discoverability" of SOAP services in 
our draft (which I think will affect how you go about "defining"
a Web service. 


Brian Lloyd        brian@digicool.com
Software Engineer  540.371.6909              
Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com