[Zope] status of SOAP for Zope?

[Toby Dickenson]

On Fri, 6 Oct 2000 11:20:38 -0400, "Brian Lloyd" <brian@digicool.com>
wrote:

>This is a very important point - I think people would rather 
>be able to implement SOAP services selectively rather than 
>by One Big Switch that may expose just about anything. I would 
>very much like to see a project started on dev.zope.org that 
>starts off by drafting a "user manual" that describes how SOAP 
>services would be implemented from the standpoint of a Zope 
>developer. This would give us a good way to come to agreement 
>without worrying about code just yet. 

Ive been considering this point of view over the weekend, and I think
I disagree. Zope already has a perfectly good definition of 'web
service' - the definition used by ZPublisher and the xml-rpc
implementation (and FTP, to a lesser extent).

Developing Zope services already involves enough detail - An extra
layer of abstraction here is undesirable.

I suspect many people using xml-rpc are, like me, not completely
satisfied with its feature set. Id been looking to soap to fill these
holes, and I would be disappointed if soap wasnt implemented in the
same way.

>Some attention should be given to how SOAP services get exposed by 
>other systems at this point (they do *not* just suddenly expose 
>every in-memory object to SOAP).

And that's plainly not the case for Petru Paler's soap implementation
- he only exposes the same objects and methods exposed by ZPublisher.

>There are a number of people 
>who have recently voiced their (legitimate) concern that by 
>default *practically everything* on their site is xml-rpc 
>enabled

Those people were concerned that too many things were exposed via
ZPublisher also.... My interpretation was that the issue is one of
access control, not publishing protocol.



Toby Dickenson
tdickenson@geminidataloggers.com