recommended approach to web services?

[Paul Boddie]

Harry George <hgg9140 at seanet.com> wrote in message news:<m3lm4rl6t9.fsf at wilma.localdomain>...
> I'm surrounded by .NET and J2EE people who add a new acronym and a new
> web protocol every other week.  Is there a best-of-breed set of tools
> for j2ee-compatible services done in python?  A community I should
> join to help make that happen?

For the J2EE/Web part, you should at least look at this site:

  http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/WebProgramming

For the XML/services part, you should look closer at the XML-SIG, and
at least be aware of the Python Web Services project (even though it
doesn't seem very active):

  http://pywebsvcs.sourceforge.net

> I'd personally do fine with cgi's, xmlrpc, and an occassional
> relax-ng, but I gotta live with wdsl, soap, xschema, etc.  I've been
> looking at soap.py, soapy, ZSI, 4Suite, wdsllib.py, gsoap (maybe a
> SWIG wrapper?), gnome's libxml2, WebWare, SkunkWeb.  Plus specs from
> W3C.  I've also looked at java implementations which seem to include
> gotchas like "BTW, this open source package relies on closed source or
> RAND underlying libraries.".

I wouldn't recommend any C/C++-based SOAP solutions in comparison to
the various Java implementations, mostly because there's a lot more
focus on making Java capable for Web services, especially in the open
source community. The only decent SOAP implementation with an open
source licence for C++ that I've found is EasySoap++
(http://easysoap.sf.net), but even a reimplementation would be less
work than attempting to wrap it up for Python.

Paul