Thursday, June 13, 2002

Mark Pilgrim's article about web services in Python contains one important bit that is often overlooked by people implementing web services with XML-RPC, the listMethods extension. The Python XML-RPC ServerProxy Objects documentation explains each method: listMethods(), methodSignature(), and methodHelp(). listMethods() and its companions provide much of the same information for an XML-RPC service as WSDL does for a SOAP service; everyone that runs an XML-RPC service should provide these methods. There is no need to define any additional standards, we already have a solution. Of course, the information provided is human readable, not machine readable, so if we wanted a more machine readable form, we could define some companion methods that always output XML. WSDL is not really human readable and I haven't seen any human readable SOAP service description. XML-RPC in Python on O'Reilly ONLamp shows how these methods are utilized by meerkat. 12:42:18 PM    comment []

SOAP WSDL Verifiers and Analyzers If you're writing client-side code and SOAP messages to talk to a web service described by a WSDL service, you'll probably benefit from seeing how one or more of the sites below parses the WSDL for a given service. If you're using a scripting language such as Python, the display of function calls and argument lists with appropriate namespace and soapaction is quite useful. WSDL Analyzer (xmethods.net) WSDL Validator (activestate.com) WsdlVerify (gotdotnet.com) WSDL Browser (gotdotnet.com) Generic SOAP Client (soapclient.com) This is a follow-up to my earlier post about frustrations with WSDL and SOAP interop. 12:34:17 PM    comment []