On 12/01/2010 03:28 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:
Cédrick,
Contrary to readable, understandable standards like XMLRPC, Json or REST, SOAP is terribly complex (like CORBA), especially if you want a general implementation that is interoperable with other implementations.
WSDL is a meta specification of an interface. To parse that you need a very good XML parser (with namespace support). Then you have to deal with the semantics (check the specs, they are huge).
Then you have to do marchalling/unmarchalling of objects to/from XML (again, very good parser needed), support lots of other standards and hope types will be compatible.
The actual calls using HTTP are pretty simple. You could certainly use Zinc HTTP Components for that.
All this technology just to do an RPC call.
In environments like .Net you can litteraly click 1 button and generate a WSDL and working client/server from a class/interface. This create the impression that this is simple/easy. Interoperability with other SOAP implementations will probably be harder.
If I were you, I would write a proxy translating SOAP to/from something simpler like REST + Json in a language with good SOAP support like .Net or Java and run that next to Smalltalk. Such bridges should be acceptable in enterprise environments.
Yes, SOAP it not just some XML format. You have to sink a lot of resources into the implementation and tool support. Keep in mind that even Cincom with all their resources didn't manage to make their SOAP library talk to SAP. They had to build a proprietary connector.
uhm, thanks for your remarks. I guess I won't spend too much time on that then... but, just to be more precise, I don't want to do something general (I'm not in enterprise environnement either), I just want to request an application located in my school. This application only exposes services (described by several varaitions of wsdl files which I think aren't totally valid). There are around 900 operations organized in 12 interfaces. So I was thinking implementing 12 classes with methods being the actual RPC call to the application (with ZincHTTP). I'll try one operation first, then I'll see if it's possible to generate these 900 methods from the WSDL files... Anyway, this is not that important and if I don't succeed, I will at least learn to use ZincHTTP :)) Thanks
Cheers Philippe