[Soap-Python] rpclib & soaplib status update

[Burak Arslan]

Hello,

With the recent work I've been doing, (ohloh says: Aug 3 — Sep 1, 1
committer made 75 commits 93 files modified, 12559 lines added, 7707
lines removed -- This is quite a rewrite for a 12kloc library.) I've
mostly cleared my rpclib high-priority to-do list. It's once more a WS-I
compliant soap server library, among many other things.

I'm currently working on its documentation by plagiarizing from soaplib
documentation where appropriate.

You may remember that my original plan was to kill soaplib once I was
out there with a decent version of rpclib. But then, I think Dieter was
right when he said: """

Names are highly important.

Thus, if someone is interested in SOAP (and Python), "soaplib" is
directly interesting for him. Background information is necessary,
to recognize that "rpclib" may be relevant for him.

"""

So, as we'd all agree that it'd be a waste of precious developer effort
to keep both code bases around, I'd like to transform soaplib to a
rpclib wrapper library and release it as soaplib-3.0. It'll also have
additional, soap-specific goodies like @soap and @document decorators. I
hope this will end the sad state of soap in python ecosystem by
providing a mature and supported implementation of a useful subset of
the soap standard.

This is of course going to happen after I'm finished with polishing and
documenting rpclib, so don't hold your breath. (unless somebody helps me
with this)

In the mean time, I'd like to encourage everybody to migrate to rpclib,
as I sincerely find it much easier to work with. I've addressed most of
the complaints about soaplib, and took the liberty of  making
fundamental changes where appropriate. See the CHANGELOG (either in the
source distribution, or here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpclib) to see
if your favourite soaplib quirk was fixed.

There's still much work and code clean-up to do, but I trust those are
not going to necessitate a change to the public api. I plan to write a
roadmap document as part of the documentation, before I delve into
further coding.

So that's mostly about it :)

Best Regards,
Burak