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SOAP questions

Robert Oschler Oschler at earthlink.net
Fri Oct 18 15:42:32 EDT 2002 
This is a bit of a complex question so let me lay out my application for
you.  I'm working on a GUI IDE tool that allows a user to build web pages
that have integrated access to a foreign (external) web server that is also
a provider of SOAP services.  The GUI IDE tool, when the user is done
working with it, generates HTML/XML pages that can be viewed in an Internet
browser and are basically the user's "web site".  My original intent was
that the user could then upload the pages to whatever web server that hosts
their web site, whether it is Apache, Zope, IIS, or something else.

Now from within the GUI IDE, which is a Delphi application, I can do runtime
access of the SOAP service _provider_ with some calls to a Python script
that performs the SOAP XML code generation and submission, and then parses
the resulting XML document returned from the service provider.  The sticking
point occurs here: as far as I know the only way I can parse the XML
document returned from the SOAP call is via some process or CGI script that
is run by the web server, right?

A more concrete example.  The user decides to put a search of the SOAP
provider's product inventory on their web page, and the results are shown in
a list box on the web page.  I let them build and test this functionality
from within the GUI IDE, by using the python interface script.  Now when I
generate the the web page to actual HTML/XML code, I know I can include the
needed SOAP call packaged up as an embedded XML fragment in the web page.
The problem is, and I'd love to be wrong here as far as my current
understanding of SOAP goes, the web server running the users web page will
have no idea what to do with the XML document returned by the SOAP call,
correct?

My desire is to make the generated pages to be as portable as possible
across multiple web servers.  But I'm guessing that at least at first, I'll
have target the biggest web server package, currently Apache, and develop
some sort of module for it that handles the returned SOAP calls and then
probably does some HTML template code processing where I fill in variables
with the SOAP results.  I'm already worried about what kind of collisions
might occur between my module and any other SOAP modules the host site
manager might have installed.  Also, I guess I'll have to then create other
modules for each platform I wish to support (IIS, etc.), correct?

If anyone has any great ideas on how to do this simpler please let me know.
Also, anywhere my knowledge is incorrect, again, please let me know.
Lastly, if XML-RPC would be any easier or better, please tell me what the
differences might be.  I'm assuming it would have the same incoming XML SOAP
doc processing problems that SOAP does.

thx
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