Generating WSDL for Python SOAP services

[Preston Landers]

Hi all.

My company (journyx.com) is planning to use SOAP to expose some methods of
our application server.  The goal is to write a client that will ultimately
be embedded in an MS Office application and make calls to installations of
our software.

We are using the actzero.com SOAP.py 0.9.5 module to implement the server
side, and the MS SOAP 2.0 toolkit on the client side.  The MS toolkit "high
level API" requires that services have a WSDL (web services description
language) file that describes the methods that are availible and their
parameters. We are really hoping to use the "high level API" and thus avoid
writing our own handlers in Visual Basic, which is not our forte.  (Python
is.)

Therefore I am planning to write a WSDL generator that will examine our
exposed methods and write out a valid WSDL file.  I realize you can compose
a WSDL file by hand, but since our interface is changing rapidly, we think a
generation program is the way to go.

I am not sure yet it I can generalize it enough to be useful to the general
public or if it will be specific to our application.

We already have a set of classes in a module that contain the methods
exposed by SOAP.  Most of these methods are simple wrappers to the "real"
internal API of our application. It should be easy enough to
programmatically determine the methods.  The real trick seems to be
determining the types of the parameters.  We are thinking of using the new
function attributes in Python 2.1 give each method a descriptor that defines
its parameters.

I'm posting to the newsgroup to check if anyone else is already working
along these lines, or has any thoughts on the subject.

cheers,

Preston Landers
Software Developer, Journyx Inc.
planders at journyx.com