Sam Ruby: "Mozilla's low level SOAP API. It is cool that Mozilla has a SOAP API. It could be made much simpler, however. Other scripting languages are doing it."

Interesting coincidence that Sam would happen to mention this at today. I'm giving a talk on SOAP to the local Linux user group, and I decided last night to focus on Mozilla's Javascript-based SOAP API, because it's a reasonable way to play with web services from the client side without requiring any special software other than Mozilla itself. I agree with Sam that it could be simpler, but I believe that a higher-level WSDL-based interface is in the works. In the meantime, it might be fun to write a tool that consumes a WSDL and generates a skeleton proxy in Javascript using these APIs, but I don't really have the bandwidth for this right now.

Here's another idea to toss out: in the Windows world, we already have an excellent means to write SOAP clients in JScript on IE, Simon Fell's PocketSOAP. Wouldn't it be interesting if someone wrote a JScript layer over PocketSOAP's COM-based API so that it could be compatible with Mozilla's API? With this, we could write portable Javascript-based SOAP clients that run on both Mozilla and IE.

Note: I pasted the quote from Sam's blog using the RadioExpress tool, which is very nice, but does not carry forward any links that were embedded in the original snippet. So please click through to Sam's page so that you can get the benefit of his cross-references.

12:41:54 PM  comment ()