Soap

[idx]

Any thoughts on SOAP these days?

We're about to ramp up on a php-based project where after the data is maitained in a centralized area, portions of it need to be picked up by various systems. (unix, linux, bsd, etc.) (various logging/status bits would also be sent back)

A dead simple start would be a basic php script that printed html or formatted text, then clients on the host systems could pickup then parse/process as necessary. Clients could then just push back results via curl or GET vars..

Then using something more standardish sounded like an idea. Any experiences with soap and why it might work well or not for this type of situation?

I looked at nuSOAP today and wacked on a few client/server examples. So far it seemed cool, but almost a bit of overkill with all the XML mangling.

[Belisarius]

As far as I understand SOAP, it's a god-awful way to do what nothing else will; inter-communicate between programming languages and implementations.

It's too bad you can't do this in Java; there is 10 million different ways for platform independant distribution under Java. But constraints are constraints. By using SOAP, you are making life harder on yourself initially in the hopes of making it easier for new applications to work with existing code.

[idx]

Originally posted by Belisarius
....it's a god-awful way to do what nothing else will...

After messing with SOAP a little more I fully agree with that. Its actually very cool, but a horrid format. Still undecided on the transport method, but I can figure that out later. Still have to design and build the app.

Can't say doing this in Java would be very productive for me. It would probably take too long to bring myself up to that level of proficiency.

-r