Rails for SOAP

September 11, 2007 2:02 AM

Are there any web frameworks which talk via SOAP instead of through SQL datasets?

I'm looking for something along the lines of Ruby For Rails or CakePHP which can talk easily to SOAP. i.e. Instead of creating a connection to MySQL it creates that connection via SOAP. I'm happy to format my SOAP calls so that they fit in with any required format & I'd like something that matches (as closely as possible) the standard CRUD you'd see with direct dataset connections. Any suggestions?

posted by seanyboy to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I'm probably misunderstanding the question, but SOAP is effectively just a communication protocol which can deal with any generic method call. So the real question is what your web app is going to be connecting to via SOAP.

At the moment you have:

application <--- (special MySQL-speak via socket or IP) --> MySQL server

and you want to replace it with:

application <--- (SOAP) --> what?

So what is it that you're planning to connect to as your datastore? Or are you looking for suggestions on that end too?

I suspect if you're looking for an application-side library that provides you a CRUD-like API and communicates via SOAP with a persistence layer somewhere, then the CRUD-like API and the persistence layer will have to know each other fairly intimately, since there's nothing inherently in the SOAP spec about data persistence and the kinds of method calls that go along with that. So maybe you're looking for a complete front-to-back technology like that, which sits on top of SOAP?
posted by chrismear at 2:59 AM on September 11, 2007

Response by poster: I'm looking for ...
application < --- (soap) --> My Database Application Server.

I envisage this being accessed with SOAP calls like ...
function updateRecord (sessionID,RecordID,RecordChangeDetails)
or
function getRecordsPointer(sessionID,ParentID,tablename)

I hadn't considered persistence, and I'm not sure why I would need it at the SOAP end. As long as my updates are mostly atomic and I'm passing a session id from/to to SOAP layer, and this session ID can be held at the client level then I can't see where I'd get problems.
posted by seanyboy at 3:34 AM on September 11, 2007

A database abstraction layer running over SOAP? Hmm. I think SQL Server comes with a whole bunch of SOAP tools, but I haven't played with it in years. "HTTP Endpoints", according to Google?

"SOAP", "ODBC", "JDBC" and "Database abstraction layer" might be useful search terms. Good luck with the 30-second page loads, though.
posted by Leon at 3:45 AM on September 11, 2007

.NET aggravates me in many ways, but its XML and Web Services API's are really, really good. Setting up a web service that accepts and responds with XML data is trivial. SQL Server stored procedures can easily format their output into XML, which greatly simplifies the process, or you can use the XmlDataDocument object to automatically convert a DataSet into XML.
posted by mkultra at 7:19 AM on September 11, 2007

Are you married to SOAP per se? If you're just looking for a generic "HTTP datastore" or can adapt something similar, take a look at the couchdb REST api. There's no application-side wrappers that I'm aware of to use this kind of interface, but they're slowly being implemented by people involved in couchdb.
posted by Skorgu at 8:43 AM on September 11, 2007

Something like MySQL SOAP Server?
posted by Laen at 8:46 AM on September 11, 2007

Perhaps you could explain why you want something like this?
posted by mmascolino at 11:29 AM on September 11, 2007

Does it have to be SOAP? If you can use a RESTful resource, check out Rails' ActiveResource.
posted by freshgroundpepper at 6:59 PM on September 11, 2007