SOAP strategies

[Paul Watson]

On Tue, 2008-02-19 at 10:01 -0800, Paul Boddie wrote:
> On 19 Feb, 16:59, Paul Watson <paul.hermeneu... at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Have I offended?  My apologies if I have.  I thought I showed that I had
> > done some homework and used Google and did the other things to show that
> > I was willing to put forth some effort.  Please tell me if I have missed
> > something.  If I should look somewhere besides Python for doing SOAP,
> > then please say that also.  Thanks.
> 
> There's a Wiki page here about Web services in Python:
> 
> http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebServices
> 
> I don't think that there's been a great deal of visible activity
> around SOAP in the Python community other than that you've already
> noticed. I entertained the idea of doing some more complete SOAP
> support as an add-on to the libxml2dom project, but not wanting to
> implement all the related specifications (schemas, service
> descriptions), I struggle to see the benefit compared to simpler
> solutions.
> 
> That's not to say that SOAP has no value. Clearly, if you consider the
> different "use cases", SOAP is probably more appropriate for some than
> other solutions would be. If one were exposing some kind of repository
> through some kind of Web service, I'd consider approaches like REST,
> along with technologies like WebDAV (which overlaps with REST), XML-
> RPC and SOAP. But if the Web service were to involve issuing
> relatively complicated queries, and/or the repository wasn't strictly
> hierarchical (or couldn't be elegantly represented in such a way),
> then it would arguably be less appropriate to deploy a "pure" REST
> solution, favouring XML-RPC and SOAP instead.
> 
> What undermines SOAP for me is that if I'm not too interested in
> treating it like some kind of RPC mechanism, then I can get most of
> the pertinent benefits from exchanging plain XML documents. You can,
> of course, do SOAP like this, but the obligation to look after the
> boilerplate elements (which should permit lots of fancy features like
> "routing", if such stuff is actually used in the real world) seems
> like a distraction to me.
> 
> Paul

Many thanks for your comments.  I will take a look at the site.

My primary orientation is in accessing large (one or more terabyte)
databases and doing data integration (ETL, ELT, EAI, EII) work.  Any
other suggestions?