"Bart Frackiewicz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Hi Ric, > >> >> I use mod_perl/apache/soap::lite to create an internal >> "application server" >> so that I can distribute processing load from the public >> webserver. This >> also allows me to expose a soap web service to the public if >> I wished to >> give them direct access to a method on this application server, but of >> course they would need a soap client to access this service. >> >> Do you want to just return an xml to your user, or do you >> want to do what I >> do which is do internal RPC using SOAP. > >in my opinion a web service has another great benefit - you can sperate the logic and >the front ends. we have here an application running on php/html, and all the logic is >inside this scripts, in case of running on another medium/language (like flash or php >for plain html) you must copy all the logic - you can call this a nightmare. > >in this case i think that a solution provides with PRC/SOAP is a good idea, but on >every article i read more, i realize that this technology is still young and just >experimental (e.g. php 4.x).
To add to the fun :) (now that my semester is over...) I mention the following only so you are aware of the possibilities, not because I think the decision to use SOAP is wrong (I don't think it is or isn't). I am working on an application that involves inter-process communication, of which XML-RPC is an example. I've decided to break my IPC needs into two classes: many-to-one or one-to-one, and one-to-many or many-to-many. XML-RPC does okay for the first set, but can't handle in any reasonably scalable manner the second set. For that, I'm taking a look at Spread [1], which Stas mentioned in passing on this list a few weeks ago. Spread also can work reasonably well, afaik, for many-to-one or one-to-one when the connection overhead associated with XML-RPC/SOAP becomes significant (e.g., frequent requests where the return value is not very important such as log consolidation). SOAP is a more complicated extension of XML-RPC (don't let the `Simple' fool you - the spec is anything but simple compared to XML-RPC -- of course, XML-RPC doesn't support object-orientation). XML-RPC is actually a fairly mature technology, imho, since it is available in such a wide range of languages and implementations. The initial spec was drawn up in April 1998 [2]. The PHP 4.x implementation is new and immature [3], but the spec itself is fairly mature. That said, XML-RPC, SOAP, and Spread all have reasonably simple Perl interfaces. [1] http://www.spread.org/ [2] St. Laurent S., Johnston J. and E. Dumbill, _Programming Web Services with XML-RPC_, O'Reilly (2001). [3] http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.xmlrpc.php -- James Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, 979-862-3725 Texas A&M CIS Operating Systems Group, Unix
