[Catalyst] Web Services Integration with Catalyst

[Bill Moseley]

Anyone added "web services" to an existing application that could
share their experiences?

This sound familiar? ;)

http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-stands-for-simple/


I will note that I've only used SOAP::Lite and in a situation where
I've controlled both the client and server.  Hence, I have some rather
general questions:


Catalyst::Plugin::Server seems reasonably new, and currently supports
XMLRPC with the promise to add SOAP at some point.  Anyone used this?

There's also Catalyst::Plugin::XMLRPC, but I wonder about how
maintained it is.  One plus is that there's Catalyst::Plugin::JSONRPC
which integrates with C::P::XMLRPC well, although I'm not so sure
anyone will use JSONRPC.

Is Catalyst::Plugin::Server a replacement for
Catalyst::Plugin::XMLRPC?

Anything else worth looking at?  Any existing SOAP implementations?


What about authentication?  In the web application I'm using a cookie
to store the session id, and storing authentication in the session.
I'm wondering if I can depend on clients supporting cookies or will
need to pass credentials (or token) on every RPC.

Poking around the web I don't really see and set standard authentication
method (although some discussion of WS-Security and SOAP headers).


Finally, will I need to (somehow) generate a WSDL document for each service?

I'm hoping I can use the application's existing login/authentication
setup. Then add controller actions for the services I wish to expose.
Have those forward to existing actions and save the response in the
stash.  Then have the XMLRCP, SOAP, JSON, plugins and views handle
serialization.  Just like magic.



-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org