Web Services / Simple Object Access Protocol

About SOAP

"SOAP is an XML-based messaging protocol. It defines a set of rules for structuring messages that can be used for simple one-way messaging but is particularly useful for performing RPC-style (Remote Procedure Call) request-response dialogues." -- http://www.soapuser.com

What is SOAP? http://www.soapuser.com/basics1.html covers the practical basics.

W3's dig on SOAP: http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/

and their dig on WSDL: http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl.html

http://www.soaplite.com has loads of links on SOAP, XML, WSDL, etc

http://www.webservices.org - The Web Services Industry Portal. Lots of info!

Works with Macromedia Flash

SOAPSecurity - Information about secure SOAP services

Oreilly's Web Services site: http://webservices.oreilly.com/

http://www.w3schools.com/

Web Services Articles

Articles that are are more "general picture":

How to avoid 7 embarrassing mistakes that CEOs make when implementing web services: http://www.web-services-advisory.com/getfile.aspx/7mistakes.pdf

A general, gentle introduction: http://www.web-services-advisory.com/getfile.aspx/intro.pdf

Clues that your Web Services are too small: http://www.web-services-advisory.com/getfile.aspx/too_small.pdf

SOAP and Perl

man page for Perl's SOAP.pm: http://search.cpan.org/author/KBROWN/SOAP-0.28/lib/SOAP.pm

SOAP::Lite, a simple and lightweight interface to SOAP, for both clients and servers - http://www.soaplite.com

Quick start, using SOAP::Lite - http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/01/soap.html

Managing Web Services with Perl, an Oreilly book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pwebserperl/desc.html

to debug SOAP messages, use the SOAP::Trace module

mod_perlservice, which is an easier way of doing Web Services with Apache/Perl - http://www.ivorycity.com/mod_perlservice/

Advanced SOAP::Lite tricks: http://www.perl.com/lpt/a/2001/04/24/soap.html

SOAP with Microsoft (aka .NET)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/

Using SOAP to integrate different platforms - http://msdn.microsoft.com/howto/integrate.asp

Book: .NET and XML - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/netxml/toc.html

Book: Programming .NET Web Services - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/prognetws/chapter/ch02.html

See also Win32Programming

SOAP in web browsers

Web Services in Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/webservices/

Using the Mozilla SOAP API: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/synd/2002/08/30/mozillasoapapi.html

SOAP and Java

If using Apache SOAP, download the .jar files from http://xml.apache.org/dist/soap
If using Sun SOAP, download the "Java XML Pack", which contains all the APIs you will need: http://java.sun.com/xml/downloads/javaxmlpack.html
Tutorials are at http://java.sun.com/webservices/docs/1.0/tutorial/index.html

SOAP is simple

When all the smoke and mirrors are taken away, that is. I'm realizing the power of SOAP now. Well, I've always kind of realized the benefit of using XML-RPC (a lightweight version of SOAP), but now that I've actually written some SOAP enabled clients, it makes total sense. What we're doing, is using SOAP to expose certain data and application logic ("methods") in legacy propietary systems. Since SOAP is a very well defined standard, there are libraries available for many languages. Right now, I have clients working in Java (via javax.xml.soap and javax.xml.messaging), Perl (via Soap::Lite), and even Excel (via Visual Basic's MS XML HTTP packages). Very nifty stuff, and lots of potential. I also have an example of doing this same XML messaging stuff thing from JavaScript, but have not tried that aspect yet.

Now I'm toying with the idea of taking the idea of Apache::MiniWiki, and abstracting the core logic (view, edit, save, log, diff, etc) into a SOAP server. Clients could then be written in mbperl ^? and PHP on the server side, or DHTML/Gtk/Java-Swing/VB/etc on the client side. In this situation, the page data would still be stored in RCS on the server side. Storing XML in RCS is just ugly, since it becomes harder to diff and rollback and so forth.

--Wim