Well, essentially, most SOAP transfer is merely an HTTP request, but "the devil is in the details", in terms of how the server listens for the structure of the requests and formats the data in the response. If all you want to return is a simple integer, no big deal. If you want to return a multidimensional table, you'll have to figure out how to format the data so that the rows and columns are properly delimited (and don't forget to escape and unescape the delimiters in the actual data!).

SOAP defines common ways to serialize the data, in such a way that it can be implemented in many languages. Also, SOAP can be proxied using other technologies (SOAP over email for example). I wrote an article for apple.com about using SOAP to bridge between Perl and AppleScript, passing structured data (a hash in Perl became a record in AppleScript... transparently). That was cool, and effortless.

SOAP is just glue. But a good glue, and multi-vendor supported. It's great that Perl has good support as well.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

In reply to •Re: Perl Webservices...whats it good for? by merlyn
in thread Perl Webservices...whats it good for? by ergowolf

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.