Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: SOAP Gateway Package ready

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Posted by William Byrne on
Support for the Tcl client stubs is an interesting one in terms of persistence and dynamic loading of the stubs. And, there's the cost of generating the stubs and who'll do the work and how often (client or server.) Certainly, the code implementation for stub generation is nothing more than an excercise. In light of your level of interest and the benefits you point out, I'll give the issue greater attention.

For now, if you're interested in the soap-gateway package, I recommend using whatever techniques you now employ to generate your stubs. Most likely, I'll provide another parameter in the WSDL fetch that allows a developer to specify stub generation. I've done this for C++ in another project and I can certainly do it for this one as well. The first blast would target the OpenACS/ns_xml/tcl combo. Upon fetching the WSDL generated code, you'd park it somewhere in your OpenACS code base. I'll extend the SG's source library management pages to include stub management.

Out of curiosity, what flavor of complex types do you require? Basic arrays, structures, arbitrary ranges within multi-dimensional arrays....

Ah, and there's still the issue of attachments...  what are your thoughts on the DIME spec?

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Posted by Dan Wickstrom on
Just being able to generate the stubs would be nice, but having Stub management would be a plus.

As far as complex types, I'm currently using arrays of structures (java beans), but I'm sure that having other complex types like multi-dimensional arrays and structures that contain nested structures would also be useful.

I haven't used attachments, other than to try a few attachment based demos, but I definitely think they would be worth having.

With regards to the use of tDom, using the xml abstraction procs in openacs would probably be the way to go for now, so you don't have to rewrite everything when openacs goes from ns_xml to tDom.

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Posted by William Byrne on
Funny you should mention XML abstraction. I almost created an abstraction in SG when I rolled back the ns_xml version from 1.5 to 1.4 a couple of days ago. So, there's a XML abstraction somewhere?

I'd be more than happy to use tDOM. I noticed it delivers namespace info which ns_xml didn't do very well.

I agree Bart would be a good person to contact since this entire SOAP Gateway package began with the need to connect to the ecommerce package.