SOAP interop

[Robert Olson]

At 02:19 PM 1/30/2003 -0600, Ivan R. Judson wrote:

>Currently we're assuming an all python environment (as was discussed
>yesterday), meaning we ship around python objects because we don't have
>schema/wsdl support to serialize them automatically. I think this is the
>crucial issue. If we can get schema/wsdl support working in pyGlobus then we
>get a) language independence (serialization should work, if not it's a bug
>or standards compliance issue), b) wsdl exposed for those who want to use
>it, and as another documentation solution.
>
>Thoughts?

This little exploration actually started out by looking into that issue. It 
turns out that SOAP.py serializes the python objects in a pretty reasonable 
manner: a python object instance serializes as a soap struct with a 
particular set of tags that I think should be identifiable (and 
documentable) in an interoperable way. If the SOAP implementations could 
actually talk in a reasonable way this could be investigated further.

Using schemas and wsdl don't get around the problem of having to clearly 
define the data types we are passing; it just changes the way they are 
described.

--bob