[Catalyst] Web Services Integration with Catalyst

[Michael Alan Dorman]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:14:48 -0700
Bill Moseley <moseley at hank.org> wrote:


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

I've used it to do XMLRPC---implementing blogger/metaweblog/mt
interfaces.  It was a piece of cake to make it work, debugging was easy
when things did go pear shaped (easy to dump input and output, etc.),
it was about 1000% easier than I ever expected.

> 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.

The interfaces I was doing all pass user/password among the parameters
to every invocation, and doing validation using the standard authz
plugins in an auto method in the the module where I put the interfaces
was, again, a piece of cake---it just worked.

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

Not a clue, since I was just working to implement a "standardized"
interface.

I daresay that it's not going to be "magic", but I don't imagine that
implementing alternative interfaces will be very arduous, either.

Mike.