During our latest bug scrub, the OpenLaszlo team had to make a decision about how to prioritize SOAP bugs. We realized that we don't have the resources to continue maintaining the existing SOAP functionality, along with the large number of high priority platform tasks that we are working on.
If there are people in the community relying on SOAP support, this might be an opportunity to get together and work on a new version of an API. The way the SOAP package works currently is by passing a SOAP envelope to the LPS server, where an Apache library in Java is used as a proxy to perform the SOAP request. But given the power of today's Flash 10 and DHTML runtime environments, I think it might be possible to implement the SOAP mechanism completely in LZX/javascript on the client. The LPS server (or something compatible with the data proxy protocol) could still be used to prox underlying XML data requests at the transport layer, if that were needed to bypass browser security limitations. But it would simplify things considerably to implement the SOAP protocol entirely in LZX. I have read that Flash 10 has a SOAP RPC library (though I have not tried it), and there may be others available written in Javascript for DHTML which would make a good base for a new SOAP package for OpenLaszlo. It does not look like we're going to be fixing any of the outstanding SOAP bugs at this point, so users depending on this feature should begin to make other plans. -- Henry Minsky Software Architect [email protected]
