Jerry Asher wrote:
>
> Mike, and everyone,
>
> I am curious what folks in the community are doing with SOAP or XML-RPC in
> general, and specifically with AOLserver. And with respect to AOLserver,
> how have you implemented SOAP functionality.
>
> Me, I'm just playing with it at this point with AOLserver. I've
> implemented Dave Bauer's/Aaron Swartz's XML-RPC module (built on top of
> ns_xml), and on top of that built an XML-RPC protocol that implements a
> remote site search. I've found it works, works well in fact, but it sure
> seems sluggish (XML-RPC calls from my machine to my machine in the order of
> several tenths of a second, where I bet that the classic POST and parse
> mechanism would have been on the order of hundredths of a second.
>
> I'll tell you one area where .NET just kicks butt over what is available
> today (that I know about) in terms of SOAP/XML-RPC. .NET comes with a
> utility (wsdl) that visits a wsdl compliant SOAP/XML-RPC site and then
> creates for you a .NET compatible proxy class that performs all the
> SOAP/XML-RPC calls for you. You use normal local calls to get/set the
> local proxy class and the SOAP/XML-RPC magic happens for you in the
> background. Very slick, and a very slick way to get a client working in a
> matter of minutes.
>
> Oh, man, every day I spent past that first day on my remote search demo
> sure felt like wasted time after seeing a demonstration of the .NET wsdl
> utility that did what took days for me in the time it takes for you to type
I am doing work for a customer who needs to provide a programmatic API to
some of their aolserver facilites and SOAP to me seemed like the best fit for
the job.
I only started learning something about soap a few days ago but it seems
to me to be a fill a particular niche in a reasonably sane way.
what i'm doing at the moment is just taking pat thoyts' tclsoap code and adapting
it for use with aolserver. Upon first encounter, it seems like a easy and
natural thing to do in aolserver. i think aolserver would be a good
platform for providing soap services on. the tclsoap configuration i am playing with
at the moment is 100% tcl in it's implementation. it takes about .25 seconds
for the tclsoap module to process a "hello world" soap request on my wimpy
sparc ultra 5 aolserver. for the particular application i'm working on
that good enough for the near future and worth the few days of effort
i've put in on it.
if you've got an server that's going to get pounded
something else would have to be done. you can replace the
xml parser underneath tclsoap w/ a C based one. that might
make some difference.
to make it "reasonable and popular" it would probably have to interoperate with things
that people on PC's use like wsdl. i'd be willing to entertain the idea of doing work
in that
area though. at the moment, i'm not particularly knowledgable on the subject
you might want to make queries on comp.lang.tcl and/or talk to some people like
steve ball (tclXML author) and pat thoyt (tclsoap) author
-mike hoegeman
