The most pressing problem I have with SOAP::Lite right now is that it doesn't support complexTypes

Elaborate on 'doesn't support ComplexTypes'. I pass through rather complex structures, and it handles them just fine. It doesn't support auto-generation from WSDL for them, and it adds some random 'gensym' elements all over the place if you try to return a complex perl data structure to it, but it is possible to pass ComplexTypes with SOAP::Lite.

It also doesn't seem to evaluate input in boolean context appropriately, but that could be related to the lack of complexType support: all of my boolean values are used in complexType functions.

You have to use SOAP::Data to cast things to boolean. It can't tell if you mean 'false' as a string, or as a boolean. Deserializing should be fine, but the serializer makes a whole lot of guesses about what it sees, if you don't wrap stuff w/ SOAP::Data. (and it's frequently wrong, for the data I have ... eg, I send timestamps as a string field, eg '20060101000000' ... which matches the rules for float, so gets encoded as such unless I tell it otherwise.

I have also seen what seems to be a pretty evil bug when sending non-ascii characters like è or à, where the entire message gets encoded in what seems to be base64.

That's not a bug. It's a feature. Look at SOAP::Serializer ... in Autotyping, 'base64' has the highest precidence. base64's match criteria is:

base64 => [10, sub {$_[0] =~ /[^\x09\x0a\x0d\x20-\x7f]/}, 'as_base64'],

If you prefer, you can place something at precidence 5 (or anything lower than 10), that will match your cases, and send it to 'as_string' or your prefered function.

And even a cursory look at the SOAP::Lite mail list is a source of myriad other bugs and problems.

Yep. If you manage to find a non-trivial software package with absolutely no bugs or problems, let me know, because I don't think they exist. (unix's 'yes' qualifies as trivial)

there are some fairly serious Perl programmers at my company, and none of them are willing or able to tackle the problems with SOAP::Lite.

That's probably for the best -- you'll melt your brain trying to understand what's going on. It's not something to be attempted lightly.

For all of its failings, SOAP::Lite can be made fit most problems. I'm not going to claim all, because SOAP is not an easy subject. If you have specific problems, there's a good chance that someone out there can help you, but it's not going to be a free ride -- expect there to be some pain. Much of the problem isn't with SOAP::Lite, but with SOAP in general, and the varying implementations across toolkits.

In reply to Re^3: start over with SOAP in Perl? by jhourcle
in thread start over with SOAP in Perl? by McMahon

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