Optio Releases Soaplib · Monday, February 12, 2007

My employer, Optio Software, today announced the release of our SOAP web services library for Python as an open source project. I am no big fan of SOAP, but sometimes you just have to interoperate with it, and if you are going to do it, you might as well make it as easy as possible. Thats where soaplib comes in, making SOAP suck less.

Aaron Bickell is the primary author of soaplib, and will be doing a presentation on it at PyCon in a few weeks. He has done an outstanding job of making SOAP as easy to deal with as XML-RPC is in Python, even allowing you to deploy your SOAP web services as WSGI applications.

We have also noticed Kevin Dangoor’s release of TGWebServices and are hoping to work with him in the future.

Comment

  1. I am guessing your company decided that ZSI was not able to be rehabilitated?
    — Cowmix    1264 days ago    #
  2. Yes, we played with ZSI, but found that it was very difficult to use and was not very Pythonic. Also, its much easier for us to start from the ground-up, rather than piggybacking on top of something else.

    This is not to take anything away from the ZSI folks, who I am sure worked very hard on ZSI. I know that there are people out there who use it and like it, but soaplib solves the problem in a different way that is a bit more approachable.
    — Jonathan LaCour    1264 days ago    #
  3. For the record, I also tried ZSI and came to the same conclusion that Jonathan and Co. did.

    Had our timings been different TGWebServices would quite possibly not even exist, and I am looking forward to seeing if we can eliminate the overlap.

    I’m sure that anyone who has had to work directly with the SOAP protocol can attest that it’s not the kind of thing you want to develop and maintain.
    — Kevin Dangoor    1263 days ago    #
  4. Kevin,
    These recent developments are exciting. Now TurboGears stack supports both SOAP and XMLRPC. Any thoughts on some basic CORBA support? It would make it more competitive with Java app servers. A decorator using omniORB’s DMI features to expose a few objects over IIOP might be interesting. I will look into this myself at some point.

    Ravi Teja.
    — Ravi Teja    1259 days ago    #

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