This implementation allows you to write standard Perl objects and expose them through SOAP.

As you may know by now, SOAP 1.2 has reached Proposed Recommendation (PR) status, which means that the XML Protocol Working Group believes that it's done.

In this installment of The Python Web services developer, Mike Olson gets back to writing some Python code. This column will revisit the example code from the fifth and sixth columns in this series, in which Mike and Uche Ogbuji talked about SOAP.py and ZSI, two available SOAP implementations in Python. Mike will continue the examination of these libraries and see how they interact with each other.

The frenzy over Google's new SOAP API is just plain silly. Today I was sent details by a proud PR representative (I'll not mention them, but you'll likely hear from them yourselves) of his company's Google-over-email service, using the SOAP interface. What a waste of space for something that can be done in one line of shell script!

The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is making profound changes to the communications and interactions landscape. In the truest sense of the phrase, SOAP is a disruptive technology. SOAP is not only being adopted and endorsed by rivals such as Sun and Microsoft and standards bodies such as the United Nations (ebXML), but is also being actively used to solve real-world problems. As the baseline technology for Web services, SOAP is leveraging pervasive Internet technologies to deliver two much spoken-about paradigms: the delivery of software as services and, as a corollary, the integration of online businesses.

As Tarak Modi mentioned throughout the first three parts of this series, Apache SOAP client developers end up with a raw deal, since they must complete extra work that they normally would not have to do.

The desire to integrate XML with pre-existing data formats has been a long-standing and persistent issue for the XML community. Users often want to leverage the structured, extensible markup conventions of XML without abandoning existing data formats that do not readily adhere to XML 1.0 syntax.

Your identity-management system doesn't have to dictate your corporate security strategy anymore. SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) provides a standard way to exchange authentication and authorization information between different vendors' other applications so you can switch from LDAP to RADIUS authentication, for instance, without recoding your applications.

It is early in Web services implementation, but not too early to begin worrying about how Web services will hold up under load and stress. Thus, test companies such as Parasoft have entered the fray.

Imagine that you need some specific information in your application such as a shipping rate calculator. You now go to a service search engine and look up availability for the type of service you need in a standard manner over the Web.

Microsoft's .NET technology rests on XML and employs it for Internet communication (including Web services), data storage, and many other purposes. .NET contains many functions that translate various kinds of objects—including database tables—to and from XML formats.

The method wrappers we've used this far either returns the response element as is, or explicitly converts the response to a Python object.

In our previous article on architectures for learning systems ("The next big thing…") we talked about some of the ways that different standards-compliant programs could be connected using "services".

SOAP::Lite is a Perl module that enables and facilitates the composition, transportation, and processing of SOAP messages. In this article, I'll walk you through using SOAP::Lite to build a very basic Web service. You'll be amazed at how little code or knowledge of SOAP is required to actually create a Web service with this toolkit.

The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is making profound changes to the communications and interactions landscape. In the truest sense of the phrase, SOAP is a disruptive technology. SOAP is not only being adopted and endorsed by rivals such as Sun and Microsoft and standards bodies such as the United Nations (ebXML), but is also being actively used to solve real-world problems. As the baseline technology for Web services, SOAP is leveraging pervasive Internet technologies to deliver two much spoken-about paradigms: the delivery of software as services and, as a corollary, the integration of online businesses.

In this article, Benoît Marchal steps up on the soapbox to tell you why SOAP's simplicity (among other things) is winning him over.

SOAP defines a set of serialization rules for encoding datatypes in XML. All data is serialized as elements rather than attributes. Attributes are only used for structural metadata; for example, when references are needed. For simple types such as strings, numbers, dates, and so forth, the datatypes defined in XML Schema Part II—Datatypes are used.

Over time, Redmond’s tendrils may seem like they’ve glommed onto everything. Even with Microsoft’s receiving a historic posterior chewing in court, folks still wonder if Redmond, Washington, will someday be the capital of the universe. So it’s no surprise that .NET has many convinced that Microsoft wants to own the Web services market as well. Now I won’t say that Microsoft doesn’t want a big chunk of the business that Web services will spawn, or even that .NET is specifically designed to ensure that goal. But given the nature of the Web services architecture, anyone completely owning such an effort isn’t just unlikely, it’s arguably impossible.

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a way for you to remotely make method calls upon classes and objects that exist on a remote server. It's the latest in a long series of similar projects like CORBA, DCOM, and XML-RPC.

One of the most popular patterns for use in J2EE server applications is the Stateful Session Facade. But how do you take advantage of stateful session beans when SOAP doesn't support state? This question is especially relevant to software development today where Web Services are becoming popular for connecting Visual Basic (VB) 6 and .NET SOAP clients to J2EE engines.