[Biogeosdi] Report from OGC meeting

Javier de la Torre jatorre at gmail.com
Tue Jul 17 17:29:35 CEST 2007


Right Renato,

What you say is totally true for the response. I dont mind ignoring  
the SOAP envelope when parsing results from the SOAP service  
(Although I still dont find it very useful). The problem actually is  
in performing request. Because SOAP makes mandatory to send specific  
SOAP headers on the HTTP request, more concretely the action, it  
becomes pretty hard to use directly with simple PHP. That is actually  
the ONLY reason why we were using NUSOAP, to not have to handle  
having to create our own functions to do such low level requests in  
HTTP.
Actually when parsing problems with the service I came to look at how  
NUSOAP handles doing requests to SOAP services and it is definitely  
not done in 5 lines of PHP code.

Well, this is only one part of the story. The other is how difficult  
is to actually debug and program this document style SOAP services.  
Because it was so hard to use in PHP we actually finished using the  
Oxygen program as a SOAP client for testing. This way we could  
actually know what was coming from the services. I know we could have  
created a little bit more of code in PHP to do better "inspropection"  
of the services, but actually this was the easiest way to do it...  
not that nice.

The SOAP extension in PHP I believe didnt work with SOAP document/ 
style but I might be wrong... at least that is what I remember. I  
think it was created mainly for SOAP-RPC style.

I did not know wsdl2php when we started I have to say :((( Maybe it  
works fine...

At the end I believe it is a matter of compensation... do you really  
wanna have all that headaches for actually not having any good back?  
I mean, if you are gonna handle the results the way you want (I am  
also exceptical about code generators from WSDL as they usually  
generate huge objects for document style services that does not  
benefit you, it is the service developer point of view, not the  
client point of view and I might dont want most of your stuff), by  
parsing the document at the end as if it was not SOAP... then... what  
is the point about it?

Cheers.

Javi.


On 17/07/2007, at 16:57, Renato De Giovanni wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Most of you already know that I really like the REST style, but in
> the case of OMWS I think these would be the only benefits:
>
> - Simple methods like getAlgorithms, getLayers, getProgress, etc.
> could be invoked without using any XML.
> - No need to have SOAP headers and SOAP envelopes.
>
> This would certainly simplify things, but at the same time it's not
> such a big difference. If during the biogeosdi meeting you had to
> deal with a REST API instead of the SOAPish one, my feeling is that
> the biggest benefit would be that you would not spend any time trying
> to get it working with existing SOAP libraries. I suppose this was
> the biggest problem: trying to get it working with a SOAP library
> that doesn't support document/literal well, or with a SOAP library
> that doesn't have good documentation.
>
> If you didn't spend any time trying to get it working with SOAP
> libraries and if you concentrated only in generating the XML requests
> by hand and parsing the XML responses by hand (ignoring the SOAP
> headers), you could get it working with approximately the same effort
> as if it was a REST API. The document/literal SOAP style doesn't
> require you to deal with SOAP encoding, which would force you to use
> a SOAP library and could bring incompatibilities between SOAP
> libraries.
>
> Another alternative would be to use the SOAP extension in PHP:
>
> http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.soap.php
>
> Or even this interesting tool, since OMWS has a WSDL file:
>
> http://www.urdalen.no/wsdl2php/
>
> Anyway, I just wanted to make these general comments about the
> subject.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Renato
>
> On 15 Jul 2007 at 19:58, Tim Sutton wrote:
>
>> Hi All
>>
>> I got a chance to read through through the final report - really  
>> great
>> job! I think we need to take the comments on omws into account and
>> implement it as a rest service at some stage. Javi thanks for  
>> bringing
>> it all together and getting it sent off to Lee.
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Tim
>
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> biogeosdi at lists.tdwg.org
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