Re: SOAP, WSIT, I'm LOST, sort of...

Bob Gezelter wrote:
On Sep 6, 11:51 am, Jan-Erik Söderholm <jan-erik.soderh...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Jeffrey H. Coffield wrote:
Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
HI.
Currently running VMS system with :
DS20/500, 2 CPU
VMS 7.3-2
TCPIP 5.4 ECO 2
OSU web server 3.6 and 3.8 (in three running copies)
Now I've been asked to evaluate "WEB Services"
as a new "interface" to this system. I have checked
the WSIT and SOAP pages at HP. As far as I can see,
there are a few show stoppers as the system is
configured today. I need (at least one) ODS-5 disk
and also a current JAVA install for WSIT. But, according
to the development manual for WSIT, there are (at least one)
some tools (OBJ2IDL.EXE) that only runs on VMS I64.
That's a major problem, of course.
Anyway, are there anyone who actualy have tried/used
these tools? And any other thought about this WEB Services
"thing" are also welcome.
I'm currenly using the simple DCL scripting of the OSU
server (which works just OK) to produce dynamic page
contents. The WEB services is ment to be a data-transfer
interface, sort of not-having-to-use-FTP. I guess that one
also cat get a more "on-line" interface where apps can
exchange status info over the same connection. Now, not
realy sure what I'm talking about here... :-) :-)
Jan-Erik.
I use SOAP to communicate with several other companies that I don't know
(and don't really care) what O/S, etc they use. It works very well for
me. Tools? Practically none. All SOAP is, as far as I can see, is some
standardized XML which I generate using an XML template from an OpenVMS
Basic program calling CURL to do the actual transmission. The last one I
did, took me about 3 hours from receiving the SOAP spec to actually
exchanging data. Could some tools reduce that programming time? Maybe if
I spent a month or so sorting out all the options, learning how they are
supposed to be used, Googling out arcane questions that everyone asks
and no one answers.
CURL is one of the tools that I have found that is really worth learning
what the options can really do for you.
Jeff Coffield
Hi.
Sound interesting. cURL is like a file transfer tool,
as far as I know. In my case, my server will mostly
*receive* data (datafiles with fixed format structured
records). That is, as the receiving side of an "WEB Service"
transaction.

Jan-Erik.

Jan-Erik,

Of course, WSIT and SOAP is potentially a complicated discussion. As a
starting point, there is the fact that SOAP is used both to refer to a
protocol (the Simple Object Access Protocol; which is a standard for
structuring XML entities for exchange over various lower-level
messaging protocols, e.g. SMTP and HTTP). It is also used as a name by
the one of the implementations of that protocol; hence much of the
confusion.

There are other implementations to ease use of this protocol by C/C++
and other traditional higher level languages, including gSOAP (which
John App referenced the other week in this newsgroup). There is an
article by David Sullivan in a back issue of the OpenVMS Technical
Journal, as well as several presentations on the subject from the
Technology Symposium and the Bootcamp. While I have not checked in the
last few weeks, a functioning set of the tools for the packages
available on the OpenVMS www site did run on Alpha. I would suspect
that the tool which was referred to in this thread original posting
was "Itanium-only" because it referenced the object file format, which
differs on Alpha and Itanium.

There are also SOAP implementations in PERL and other scripting
languages.

The reason for using a SOAP toolkit is long-term flexibility, not the
ability to craft a program which speaks SOAP for a single, limited
purpose. The downside is that dealing with a toolkit means
assimilating a new package, with its own inherent learning curve. The
good news is that the SOAP packages have tended to be Open source; the
bad news is the documentation and sources are also of the "Open
Source" standard.

While I would not hesitate to write a one-shot to generate XML, I
would recommend that a client seriously consider adopting a toolkit
for this approach. It is a far safer long-term solution. If the one-
shot approach were still desired, I would strongly recommend a local-
developed minimal SOAP toolkit, used as a shareable library, to allow
later replacement by a standard package without re-working large
volumes of code. I would avoid explicitly hand-generating XML.

I hope that the above is helpful. If I can be of assistance, in the
forum or privately, please let me know.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com


Hi and many thanks for a realy content-rich post!
Not too common these days, I'm afraid... :-)

To add the the picture, this "new" interface is ment
to complement the current that is a simple mail based
communication. The "other side" simply sends a mail
to a specific user, using an agreed on subject with a
datafile ZIP'ed and attachede using standrad MIME format.
On the VMS system ("my" system) this mail is taken care
of using DELIVER/MPACK/MUNPACK/UNZIP and the datafile
is finely FTP'ed over to an IBM mainframe to be stored
into a central DB2 database. The mainframe interface is
not the target right now.

Now, some users would like to have an alternative to
this mail based communication. FTP has been discussed.
WEB Services was also mentioned. And that's why I was
asking.

OK, I have to dig a little more into this.
As you said, one of the problems with open source
stuff is that it might be hard to find a consistant
set of documentation...

Jan-Erik.

.

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