[Catalyst] Catalyst and SOAP?

[Adam Jacob]

On Mar 18, 2007, at 12:02 PM, Matthieu Codron wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm looking for the best strategy to mix a traditional Catalyst web  
> app and SOAP web services.
>
> I just would like to quickly expose some actions as web services.  
> However, I just could not find a Catalyst-ic way to do that (found  
> Catalyst::Plugin::Server but I'm not sure how to use that one).
>
> For now, I seems that I will need to operate a separate application  
> (using Apache::SOAP for example) for enabling web services.
>
> As for the "Why SOAP?" question, I'm trying to communicate with  
> a .Net client application. Since accessing a Web Service in .Net is  
> a point-and-click operation, it was a no-brainer ... until I saw  
> the serverside problems, that is :)
>
> Any ideas?

SOAP is a fairly complex protocol, all things considered. (Where we  
are comparing to to XML-RPC and a simple REST service.)  At the  
moment, I think your two best bets for doing Web Services in Catalyst  
are:

Catalyst::Plugin::Server - A very nice XMLRPC implementation
Catalyst::Controller::REST - For doing REST based web services

I have no real experience in .Net, so I can't say how easy it would  
be to use an XMLRPC service from .Net.  I can't imagine it would be  
that hard.

Certainly, calling a REST service from .Net should be trivial, since  
you are using HTTP as the "protocol", you really only have to be able  
to send arbitrarily formed requests to the server.  Assuming you have  
a serializer that matches, things should be easy from there.

If you're feeling like contributing, I'm sure the  
Catalyst::Plugin::Server code would love a SOAP layer.

Adam