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Programming Web Services with Perl
The book assumes the reader will have the knowledge of an intermediate level Perl programmer. I.e., the reader is assumed to have a working knowledge of references, data structures, and object-oriented Perl. On the other hand no previous knowledge of XML, XML-RPC, SOAP or XML related technologies is required.
It should also be mentioned that both of the authors Randy J. Ray and Pavel Kulchenko are also the principle developers of the most popular XML-RPC and SOAP Perl modules: XML::RPC and SOAP::Lite respectively. That said, the book is not a soap box for the authors to tout the merits of their tools.
Rather, it is a practical book which starts with grounding fundamentals. Readers should walk away with a core understanding of XML-RPC and SOAP and not just a particular tool set for working with them. The authors examine the alternative XML-RPC and SOAP tools, illustrate how they are used, and give practical and even handed reasons why their modules should be preferred. Which comes down to issues of features, active development, support, and the amount of work required to code to a particular interface. They then settle down to a comfortable and thorough guide to XML::RPC and SOAP::Lite.
The topics and issues are illustrated throughout using real world web services. For example creating an XML-RPC client for O'Reilly's Meerkat news wire, or a SOAP client to covert use.perl.org's journal stream to RSS. Code is presented to the reader filtered down to highlight each particular issue as it is discussed. This is nice in that it avoids listing slight variations of the same code multiple times, but on the down side it can also leave the reader flipping back and forth to reassemble an example in their head. Full code for each example is provided in the appendices. And all of the example code may be downloaded from O'Reilly.
All-in-all, the book is a thorough practical introduction to working with XML-RPC, SOAP and related technologies. When I started reading the book, I was a bit disappointed to see that it only covered XML-RPC and SOAP related services. When I finished, I was impressed with how very much information they'd managed to pack into so few pages.
And yet, I was left wishing there'd been a more through coverage of interoperability issues between other SOAP implementations and things like custom de-serializers. To be honest interoperability and de-serialization are mentioned, and the authors do an excellent job of referring the reader on to sources for continued reading on most other topics.
The book does an admirable job balancing content, length, and information density. Not to mention an excellent job delivering the information that will still be relevant years and not just weeks from the date published. Most of the topics I'd wished to see covered in more depth are those that are still developing and consequently most likely to become quickly dated. In short a well balanced practical guide to applying XML-RPC and SOAP to solve problems.You can purchase Programming Web Services with Perl from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The thing I don't quite get is the reference to the REST standard. That is some hype Roy Fielding put in his thesis. It was never agreed upon by the other members of the Web team and there is no real trace of its influence on the development of web standards for the simple reason that the thesis only came out long after the fact.
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A fellow San Diego Perl Monger has written a book about Perl and the web, including a chapter about web services.
It's a New Riders book, but the entire contents are available free on the web.
There could be a lot of pilot projects but do they really count ?
Isn't the very word "web-service" a marketing gimmic like B2B, B2C, Enterprize, Portal etc ?
One thing web-service promised was a homogenous set of APIs, but do you really see that happening ?
I mean every month i see some company dropping from the web-services consortium and some other joining. How then are they going to agree on standards ?
And if they do agree on standards won't that make their business model vulnerable ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
For instance, when I am teaching a student who is new to a particular field and I am assuming that they don't have any previous knowledge of the material - my first lesson doesn't throw around acronyms without any explanation of them. It's just good practice to define your terms, if you're assuming the reader has no knowledge of them beforehand.
And there you have my input! Have a Great Day!
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It's 10 bucks cheaper at Amazon, compared to BN.
Here -> Programming Web Services with Perl
You can save 10% if you "share the love"
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It actualy works out great. Example the place I work we have something like 20 VB programers for our web service and its buggy and slow. A perl shop I'm familer with has 5, their code is more complex and runs faster with fewer bugs.
That's right, you'd have to add the mapping to the apache web server configuration. I don't see what the big deal with doing that. Is it easier to edit web.xml than httpd.conf? As someone who deals with both, I don't think so.
But regardless, I'd like to point out that you are essentially comparing configurations between Apache (a web server) with Tomcat (an application server, which can, but shouldn't be used as a web server). I am not sure how these reflect negatively on perl.
There is a similar debate at the place where I work. What's really funny is the VB programmers defend their technology by claiming the Perl developers are just better programmers, so you can't conclude that it's the platform.
Honest!
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I would hate to see SOAP::Lite benchmarks personally. It performs really well for small payloads, but quickly begins to fall over when payloads exceed a "reasonably" large size... but then again, developers and architects should have all the facts when thinking about how they will architect their Web services.
.NET (eeeh-gads!) (please let Mono support wsdl.exe soon!) when it comes to putting software into a production environment.
My personal take is that SOAP::Lite is probably one of the best toolkits for quick WS prototyping and simple projects, but I would tend to steer towards Axis, WebLogic, WASP, and yes, even
^byrne :/
Why wouldn't anyone use web services? You get human-readable data objects. You can leverage HTTP as a transport, which makes it really easy to deploy robust servers built on proven technology. HTTP also gives you a variety of flexible security solutions, especially when it comes to firewalls.
.Net clients to talk to J2EE back ends and vice versa. The big question is whether all these companies are going to play nice. I think customers will demand it though, so they will have no choice.
And since the standards are open you can hack wrappers for other communication protocols around a web service transport. It should be possible for
For example, let us say I wanted to map a directory to a particular CGI script. If I were building CGI apps with Perl, I couldn't do that
What does that have to do with Perl? If you were building CGI apps with Java, you wouldn't be able to do that either. CGI != perl.
On the other hand, this can be easily accomplished by a developer building a Web App for a Java servlet container (like Tomcat) by specifying the mapping in the WEB-INF/web.xml of the web application he's building.
Playing along with this terrible web-server configuration example... You can easily do the same thing with mod_perl or PHP (which uses mod_PHP). A "servlet container", mod_perl, and mod_PHP are all types of web app server. Compare apples and apples.
bp