How do I make web services work with perl ?

[dmedhora]

I mean really now... I've tried the examples in the documentation and
though a simple client and server works, its practically impossible for
me to get WSDL::Generator working.
I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, or the documentation sucks.
Can someone help me find out?

Following is the HOW TO that I extracted from the documentation :-

BEGIN

..How To
Produce a WSDL schema from a SOAP::Lite/Apache/mod_perl web service.

In this example a web service that exposes two methods - Hello and
GoodBye (Could you respect example that did include Hello World as
the
basis?). One method, Hello, accepts a string as an argument
(presumably
the first name of the person to greet) and returns a string with
"Hello,
" prepended to the argument and "\n" added to the end. The other,
GoodBye, accepts a string as an argument (presumably the first name
of
the person to greet) and returns a string with "Goodbye, "
prepended to
the argument and "\n" added to the end.

Because these examples are so short and so you will know exactly
what is
going on, the complete setup including source code is included here
before WSDL::Generator is used to build a WSDL schema.

Configuration

In your perl.conf file you should see the following directive:

<Location /world> SetHandler perl-script PerlHandler CLASS::World
</Location>

Which will point the appropriate CLASS::World.pm file on you
system. You
could include this module in one of the standard directories
searchable
by @INC or you could add a "use lib" statement to your startup.pl
script
to add the directory containing the module to @INC.

CLASS::World.pm

package CLASS::World;

use SOAP::Transport::HTTP;

my $server = SOAP::Transport::HTTP::Apache ->
dispatch_to('WorldFunctions');

sub handler { $server->handler(@_); }

package WorldFunctions;

sub new { bless {}, shift; }

sub Hello { my ($s, $name) = @_;

return 'Hello, ' . $name . "\n";
}

sub GoodBye { my ($s, $name) = @_;

return 'Goodbye, ' . $name . "\n";
}

1;

As you can see this is a really generic and straightforward
service. If
everything is configured correctly and you get no errors when you
start
Apache, you should be able to access the methods in this service
with
the following client script. Replace *host.your.domain* with the
hostname of your SOAP server.

world_client.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl

use SOAP::Lite +autodispatch => uri=>"WorldFunctions",
proxy=>'http://host.your.domain/world';

print Hello('Joe');

print GoodBye('Joe');

Generating the WSDL schema.

Using WSDL::Generator, one can quickly generate the WSDL schema for
a
particular SOAP service. You will need to copy the Perl module for
the
service to a directory and modify it as follows.

SOAP Service Perl module

# package CLASS::World;

# use SOAP::Transport::HTTP;

# my $server = SOAP::Transport::HTTP::Apache

# -> dispatch_to('WorldFunctions');

# sub handler {

# $server->handler(@_);

# }

package WorldFunctions;

sub new { bless {}, shift; }

sub Hello { my ($s, $name) = @_;

return 'Hello, ' . $name . "\n";
}

sub GoodBye { my ($s, $name) = @_;

return 'Goodbye, ' . $name . "\n";
}

1;

Save this file as WorldFunctions.pm. The following script will call
WSDL::Generator, build the WSDL schema and output it to the screen.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use WSDL::Generator;

my $init = {

'schema_namesp' =>
'http://host.your.domain/world/WorldFunctions.xsd',

'services' => 'WorldFunctions',

'service_name' => 'WorldFunctions',

'target_namesp' => 'http://host.your.domain/world/',

'documentation' => 'Simple Hello World SOAP Service.',

'location' => 'http://host.your.domain/world'

};

my $w = WSDL::Generator->new($init);

WorldFunctions->Hello('Joe');

WorldFunctions->GoodBye('Joe');

print $w->get(WorldFunctions);

You should save this script in the same directory as the
WorldFunctions.pm Perl module file. The $init hash reference above
looks
a little confusing for those used to SOAP::Lite. That is because
SOAP::Lite save the programmer from having to know these types of
things
in order to build a working SOAP service and/or client. Where to
plug
the components of the SOAP::Lite constructor into the keys of the
$init
hashref are explained below:

* 'schema_namesp' => This is URL of where the WSDL schema will
eventually live.
* 'services' => This is the uri portion of the SOAP::Lite
constructor.
* 'service_name' => This is the uri portion of the SOAP::Lite
constructor.
* 'target_namesp' => This is the proxy portion of the SOAP::Lite
constructor.
* 'documentation' => A scalar or literal that contains the
documentation
for your exposed services.
* 'location' => This is the proxy portion of the SOAP::Lite
constructor.
Conclusion

With a little work, it is possible to build web services with
SOAP::Lite/Apache/mod_perl that can be utilized by programming
languages
other than Perl.

Joe Breeden (e-mail address removed)

END


I tried doing the above but somehow it doesn't seem to work.
I get 404 not founds and all kinds of frustrating like:
404 Not Found at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/SOAP/Lite.pm line 3113
Aargh!
Has anyone made this work?

Do people program web services with perl? ( even the oreilly book that
i read on this
topic is ill-documented for actual perl work )

Thanks