[Webdev] PHP & SOAP

[Donncha O Caoimh]

So far as I can tell, and I haven't managed to finish reading a page
about SOAP yet(something else always comes up), it's just another way of
implementing remote procedure calls over HTTP, port 80.
Many people don't like the idea, as HTTP was never meant to do stuff
like this in the first place but it has the backing of all the big
players in industry.

Simply put, you send XML to a HTTP server, with a special Content-type
of "application/soap" or similar. The HTTP server recognises the
Content-type. 
Every soap request has an envelope and a message, terminology might be
wrong, but bear with me. The server parses the envelope and figures out
what method to call. The message then contains the parameters to that
method. At least this is what I picked up from a quick talk with Dermot
last night. No doubt he can fill us in, in more detail.

So, to implement a simple SOAP server, write a parsing routine to parse
the envelope, then call the method with the parameters defined in the
message body. PHP supports expat which parses XML, and as the following
explains, it should be possible to get at the contents of the full HTTP
request from PHP..

http://www.phpbuilder.com/mail/php-general/2000082/1742.php

I could be completely wrong of course..

Donncha.


Niall O Broin wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Nov 09, 2000 at 01:15:36AM -0000, Adam Beecher wrote:
> 
> > >  For the lazy, what is SOAP, and what's so great about it ?
> > >
> > How lazy is lazy\?
> 
> Very, obviously !
> 
> I had a quick glance and I'm just idly curious - is this SOAP an ASN.1 for
> the 21st century ?