[cl-soap-devel] Re: Announcing CL-SOAP

[Sven Van Caekenberghe]

On 09 Oct 2005, at 20:48, Bill Clementson wrote:

> Hi Sven,
>
> Deleting all of the fasl files and doing a cvs update fixed the
> problem - thanks!

That's a relief.

> Now, the basic examples seem to work fine (with the exception of the
> currency conversion example which appears to be a problem at the
> service end and not with your code).

Maybe, or maybe you used the wrong arguments:

CL-SOAP 8 > (xmethods-get-rate "us" "japan")
;; SOAP CALL sending:
<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/ 
envelope/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema"  
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema-instance">
   <soapenv:Body>
     <ns1:getRate soapenv:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ 
soap/encoding/" xmlns:ns1="urn:xmethods-CurrencyExchange">
       <country1 xsi:type="xsd:string">us</country1>
       <country2 xsi:type="xsd:string">japan</country2>
     </ns1:getRate>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>
;; SOAP CALL receiving: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/'  
xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema-instance'  
xmlns:xsd='http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema' xmlns:soapenc='http:// 
schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/' soap:encodingStyle='http:// 
schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/'><soap:Body><n:getRateResponse  
xmlns:n='urn:xmethods-CurrencyExchange'><Result  
xsi:type='xsd:float'>113.79</Result></n:getRateResponse></soap:Body></ 
soap:Envelope>
113.79

> Most of the wsdl examples have a comment in them that says "doesn't
> work...". Is this a problem with the xmethod's service's wsdl or is it
> because there is wsdl functionality that you still need to implement
> before the service's description can be retrieved correctly?

Both.

The marked ones also have an explanation of why (I think) they do not  
work.
But it is also true that I wouldn't expect everything to work with  
the current state of the implementation.

As you probably read between the lines, CL-SOAP was started and  
brought to 'phase 1' in response to a request by Alain Picard from  
Memetrics - with financial support by Memetrics and Beta Nine. The  
goal of phase 1 was basically to be able to talk to the Google  
AdWords API. This required HTTPS client support, the SOAP framework,  
document style calls (as opposed to the more common rpc style), WSDL  
support and non-trivial XSD typing. All in all, more than this  
minimum is now working.

However, to move things forward, help is needed from people with  
knowledge of how SOAP works and who are willing to put some time in  
extending/improving CL-SOAP - in my opinion this can only be done by  
pursuing concrete goals like talking to this or that public SOAP API.  
WSDL and especially XSD are way to complex and broad to implement  
completely - to only solution is to be pragmatic.

> I am subscribing to the CL-SOAP mailing list and will send my future
> comments/questions to the list.

OK - I took the liberty of cc'ing this reply to the list.

> I also tried out cl-soap with OpenMCL (which I normally prefer to use
> over LW) and the same examples worked with OpenMCL.

That is good news.

> I'll let you know if I encounter any other issues.

Please do.

Sven