My first Perl script to use Soap. On the way I discovered that the FTP client built into IE uses binary mode for transfers, so edit your files in an editor that can use Unix format, like PFE, or use a better FTP client.

#!/usr/bin/perl



use CGI qw(:standard);

use Data::Dumper;



use SOAP::Lite;

use SOAP::Lite +autodispatch =>

uri   => 'http://www.allconsuming.net/AllConsumingAPI',

proxy => 'http://www.allconsuming.net/soap.cgi',

on_fault => sub {

my($soap, $res) = @_;

die ref $res ? $res->faultstring : $soap->transport->status, "\n";

};



$AllConsumingObject = AllConsumingAPI->new('12','20','12','2004');



$tmpl_var = $AllConsumingObject->GetCurrentlyReadingList('paulm');



print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

print Dumper($tmpl_var);

Java isn't always a good solution for cross-platform development because you have to go all Java all the way to the wire, but things are changing.

As Tim says, when Adam writes, you really want to read it.

Here's an overview of XML-RPC, SOAP and REST based on a little bit of research.

XML-RPC is RPC over XML. It's simple.
SOAP is simple, but is the foundation for all the Webservice stuff (now there's a phrase).
REST is even simpler, back to basics, using http things like GET and PUT and URIs.

Tim dares to speak out. Is there an alternative?

XML enters the dusty world of finance. I know there's XBRL but that's complicated.

ZapThink :: Intelligence, Research, Analysis, and Insight on XML, Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures

Stuff about browser based applications and forms and the future.
http://www.whatwg.org/
http://www.adambosworth.net/
http://bitworking.org/news/3270_Redux
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/06/11/24OPstrategic_1.html

Another thought on Postcodes and Addresses. The reason the phone book doesn't contain postcodes (as you would think it would be in the best interests of the Post Office) is because BT and the Post Office couldn't agree a price. Even more reason to take away ownership from them.

Martin contact me and I'll tell you about Delivery Point Codes. They uniquely identify a property(-ish). Wise stuff in the rest of the article though.

Back to the earth with a bump. We've purchased Sage MMS. The previous version (Line 100) was a screen-scraped DOS product. This latest version is .NET based, but no relational database at the back-end yet - just shared files on a network drive.

Still NASA doesn't exactly use leading edge technology.

Someone draw me a picture!

SOAP/Cocoon example using Google. The trailing slash in step 8 is important!

I've downloaded and installed Cocoon. The installation download says you don't need any extra files, but you will need a Java VM and a servlet container like Tomcat.

Don't rely on the installed installation guide, it doesn't guide you through the version maze with your VM and Tomcat installations. Use the online guide.

It's quite powerful, which means lots of new concepts. I wondered how you actually configured it, until I worked out that you edit xml files, there is no GUI.

I still don't really get what .NET is about, being out of development for a while, but Jon Udell has a review.

Yes, it really is alphabet soup. But they say it's not really that bad.

So what do I know so far? Webservices are a way of getting things to talk to each other, over the web. It covers a whole load of bits and pieces like SOAP and WDSL and other acronyms. It's all developing pretty fast and it's hard to get an overview of which bits work with which bits.

I'm looking into Cocoon which is a "web development framework", which seems good at getting data to flow, for example from a database through to a web page.

If you want some things to investigate read this article and come back when you understand it all. I don't.