SOAP frustrations

Cayce Ullman c_ullman at yahoo.com
Sat Oct 19 12:05:30 EDT 2002


I am one of the authors of SOAP.py.

Andrew Dalke <adalke at mindspring.com> wrote in message news:<3DAC6F04.2030704 at mindspring.com>...
> Hey all,
> 
>    I've been working with one of my clients trying to get a SOAP
> interface going for a project.  I've had a rather frustrating time
> trying to get it to work, and am using this as a chance to vent.
> 
snip
> In addition, SOAP.py has similar coding style pecularities, and there's
> some bug that comes up in Python 2.2 because of changes in Python's
> type/class system.  (We're using Python 2.1 so it isn't yet a problem.
> I also haven't tested ZSI to see if this is a problem.)
> 

I apologize for the insanity that is SOAP.py's code.  One of our
issues is we decided to use SAX over DOM for perfomance reasons, that
made the XML bits of SOAP.py mind bending.  On the plus side, you can
generally parse and fire a SOAP message with SOAP.py faster than DOM
can even validate the XML.

> Finally, it seems that neither SOAP.py nor ZSI are actively developed.
> There hasn't been a recent release of either package, and the CVS logs
> show little change.
> 
> All in all, it's rather discouraging for me to work with SOAP in
> Python, and that's given a rather non-trivial amount of experience
> in doing Python.  I would think others have worse problems.
> 
> It's such that the more CS-y people at my client's site believe that
> web services in Python are still very immature and want to switch the
> project over to Java and WebLogic(!).  (I did point out that developing
> the library I did was still less time than setting that up, but there
> are other factors in the mix as well.)
> 
> 
> What I don't get is, I figure there's enough people doing web services/
> SOAP with Python that there shouldn't be these problems.  Why then am
> I so frustrated with it?
> 
> 					Andrew Dalke
> 					dalke at dalkescientific.com

Andrew, I appreciate your frustrations, and I do still get the
occasional email complaining about some feature/bug of SOAP.py (I
guess you get what you pay for :).  Unfortunately, my current job has
little to do with SOAP, so I can no longer afford to maintain it.

We gave it a BSD-style license for a reason.  Feel free to fix it and
fork it.  For that matter, let this serve as an open call to anyone
who would like to take over as the maintainer of the "official"
SOAP.py.



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