OCaml and SOAP

OCaml and SOAP

[Richard Jones]

What's the status of SOAP (web services) under OCaml?  I urgently need
to access a SOAP-based web service, and while I could do this via Perl
and Perl4Caml, if there is a pure OCaml alternative I would rather use
that.

I've found: http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml-soap/ but it seems to be rather
out of date.  In particular I can't find a "way in" to begin using it.
The manual doesn't have any examples, and in the code there is one
example client, but it's frankly incomprehensible.

O'SOAP (http://www.asp.cornell.edu/osoap/) seems to have different
goals - writing command line clients apparently.

Can it be done with a current or future version of PXP or ocamlnet?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml and SOAP

[Richard Jones]

I've asked about OCaml and SOAP before on this mailing list and didn't
get a response.  As far as I can find out, there are two
possibilities, but both seem unsuitable.  OCaml-SOAP (from INRIA) -
the home page for this has disappeared in the site redesign.  O'SOAP -
seems to be all about writing command-line clients and attempts no
mapping of data types.

				---

    Is anyone interested in discussing writing a SOAP client
    with me, in pure OCaml, and probably based around ocamlnet
    and/or PXP?

				---

General plan: a tool which could take a WSDL description file and
generate OCaml stubs for functions and datatype conversions.  The
stubs would use PXP to make and parse SOAP XML, and ocamlnet to
dispatch the requests off to the server.

My personal itch is the Google Adwords API
(http://www.google.com/apis/adwords/).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml and SOAP

[Alain Frisch]

Richard Jones wrote:
> I've asked about OCaml and SOAP before on this mailing list and didn't
> get a response.  As far as I can find out, there are two
> possibilities, but both seem unsuitable.  OCaml-SOAP (from INRIA) -
> the home page for this has disappeared in the site redesign.  O'SOAP -
> seems to be all about writing command-line clients and attempts no
> mapping of data types.
> 
> 				---
> 
>     Is anyone interested in discussing writing a SOAP client
>     with me, in pure OCaml, and probably based around ocamlnet
>     and/or PXP?
> 
> 				---
> 
> General plan: a tool which could take a WSDL description file and
> generate OCaml stubs for functions and datatype conversions.  The
> stubs would use PXP to make and parse SOAP XML, and ocamlnet to
> dispatch the requests off to the server.

Parsing WSDL means parsing XML Schema, which is not straightforward.
Stefano Zacchiroli and I have written an approximative parser for XML 
Schema (used in CDuce); you could use it as a starting point. I'm 
currently reimplementing such a parser using my OCaml+CDuce extension
as the implementation language, and trying to follow closely the XML 
Schema spec, but I guess you won't want to switch to this experimental 
language just to parse XML Schema.

-- Alain

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml and SOAP

[Maxence Guesdon]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 10:37:53 +0000
Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org> wrote:

> 
> What's the status of SOAP (web services) under OCaml?  I urgently need
> to access a SOAP-based web service, and while I could do this via Perl
> and Perl4Caml, if there is a pure OCaml alternative I would rather use
> that.
> 
> I've found: http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml-soap/ but it seems to be rather
> out of date.  In particular I can't find a "way in" to begin using it.
> The manual doesn't have any examples, and in the code there is one
> example client, but it's frankly incomprehensible.

Hello,

The OCaml-Soap page is back on line :
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ocaml-soap/

Sorry for the delay.

Regards,

Maxence Guesdon

ocamlnet and https client (was: Re: [Caml-list] OCaml and SOAP)

[Richard Jones]

In my further pursuit of native SOAP for OCaml ...

Has anyone ever managed to extend or twice ocamlnet's http_client into
making https (http over SSL) calls?

There seem to be various plausible ways to make this happen; off the
top of my head:

(1) Extend ocamlnet properly to support SSL.

(2) Fork some sort of external proxy which does http <-> https
translation and use the ocamlnet proxy feature.

(3) Write a custom Unixqueue.event_system which can do the http <->
https translation, perhaps using Mimram and Baelde's SSL bindings for
savonet ( http://savonet.sourceforge.net/ ,
http://savonet.sourceforge.net/ocamldoc/ocaml-ssl/ )

(4) Forget about ocamlnet and use libcurl/ocurl instead.

In the absence of (1), what do people suggest?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com