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SOAP-Lite (0.69)

SOAP::Lite is one of the hardest packages I've had to work with in a long time.

That said, it's an almost trivial package to use and get basic SOAP to work. For more complex operations, there's a bit of detail work involved; but not as much as most people would fear.

On the other hand, there are also some really painful pratfalls waiting for those who have to deal with non-trivial remote interfaces. A really good exercise is to use the supplied stubmaker.pl module to break a WSDL and look at the generated code. This will show you how to construct detailed interfaces with confidence.

<BadHumor>As always, the hard part is using SOAP in your application without leaving a ring around the bathtub.</BadHumor>

Stand forewarned, there are several points in the code where Paul apparently didn't have the ability to test all combinations of input and servers. Not surprising for a module with this outright level of combinatoric explosion. Also, the verbosity of some constructs is a bit high; do yourself a favor and write helper functions to simplify Header and Data object creation.

Some other users' comments had me worried about the module's code complexity. They were wrong. The code is non-trivial, but very straightforward. Paul uses a few really slick methods to auto-generate consistent code interfaces. His code is something that we all can learn from. Kudos to the man!

Peimann, Scott Meyer - 2007-09-13 16:29:05
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SOAP-Lite (0.67)

If you come into this module looking for something "light" because it has "Lite" in the name, this isn't it. SOAP::Lite is comprehensive and I've found it to be very useful. The documentation is not as well organized as it could be, but check out the examples directory. I'm not a huge fan, but this module works pretty nicely.

hanenkamp - 2006-06-20 15:19:41
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SOAP-Lite (0.67)

SOAP-Lite implements a huge range of web service functionality. "Lite" is a misnomer IMHO. The interface is very perlish. An experienced user of SOAP-Lite can build or access a service with a tiny amount of code. WSDL support is limited, but effective.

The documentation is adequate, but just barely. This is a package that has great power buried in its guts, but most users should expect to just use the common features unless they want to expend a lot of time learning. Expect to spend a LOT of time debugging (or just figuring out how to debug). The package sorely lacks for good examples. The provided examples are either trivially simple, or head-scratchingly complex.

Whatever you do, *DON'T* look at the code if you can help it! This is the hardest to read CPAN module I've ever seen. It borders on Perl Golf complexity in places. I've spent the last few months working closely with SOAP:Lite -- at first I craved to rewrite it, but now I wouldn't dare. The author, Paul Kulchenko, is either a genius or a madman. Probably both, I'd guess.

My greatest fear is that there is some huge security hole in this package. I have no reason to believe there is one, but the code is so complicated that I'm not sure how one would manage to audit all of it.

----

Update for v0.67: Byrne Reese seems to be working hard to decipher and fix parts of this code, based on the number of new "TODO"s and CHANGES entries. Kudos to Byrne for taking on this difficult task.

This particular release has a rather painful wart. The SOAP::Lite::uri() method, which is called by EVERY SOAP::Lite client, has been deprecated. However, even the SOAP::Lite code itself was not updated to avoid calling this method! There are also 6 places where the documentation still shows examples using this deprecated method.

If you are a SOAP::Lite user, try to avoid v0.67.

Chris Dolan - 2006-02-17 14:28:32
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SOAP-Lite (0.60a)

Well, my needs are simple, so I did get a 1 line working project out of it. But I recently switched to SUSE Linux 10.0, and so had to reinstall, and that's just not happening. From a cpan point of view this is the heaviest 'lite' module I've ever seen. Zillions of dependencies.

Bryce Nesbitt - 2005-11-08 00:10:35
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SOAP-Lite (0.60a)

No rating from me yet, but be sure to checkout www.soaplite.com. There are alpha versions there which are also in CPAN and some *very nice* getting started documentation (http://guide.soaplite.com/). If you skipped the README like I did initially you may not know about this site.

Mike Orb - 2005-09-15 07:20:53
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SOAP-Lite (0.60a)

The documentation, interface, and code for this module are all atrocious. The code in particular is hack after hack after hack. And the documentation deserves less than a 1. If you are planning to use this module, be ready for hours of trial and error, and wading through a lot of mucky code.

kynn jones - 2004-11-26 06:31:42
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SOAP-Lite (0.60a)

SOAP::Lite may or may not be a great module. I just can't tell, because it is so poorly documented.

David Cantrell - 2004-09-09 06:15:28
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SOAP-Lite (0.60)

The manpage suggests that you use SOAP::Lite like this:

print SOAP::Lite
-> uri('http://www.soaplite.com/Temperatures')
-> proxy('http://services.soaplite.com/temper.cgi')
-> f2c(32)
-> result;

which is alarmingly different to the conventional way of doing things, which would be something like:

print SOAP::Lite->new(
uri => "http://www.soaplite.com/Temperatures",
proxy => "http://services.soaplite.com/temper.cgi"
)->f2c(32)->result;

(RPC::XML has a much more sane interface to web RPC stuff.)

Michael Stillwell - 2003-12-07 15:38:36
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SOAP-Lite (0.55)

This module may have problems (interface, documentation, etc.) but it deserves a high rating for one simple reason: it implements the SOAP specification very, very well. The SOAP spec is one of the more complicated I've seen and Paul deserves high praise for accomplishing this very difficult feat. If we had more programmers like him we'd probably have an XML Schema implementation by now too!

Sam Tregar - 2003-08-14 09:08:34
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SOAP-Lite (0.55)

It gets simple jobs done simply, but it may be hard to do some finetunning when it comes into the details.

I ran into a lot of problems when it came to utf8 data, but that's probably not related with this module.

The source code is probably the most difficult perl code I have ever seen.

Bottom line.
I know of no better alternative in perl.

Cl�udio Valente - 2003-08-14 05:53:22
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