SOAP::WSDL::Manual::FAQ (3)

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NAME

SOAP::WSDL::Manual::FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions (and answers)

Development status

Can I use

SOAP::WSDL

in a production environment?

Yes. is used in production environments. You should - as always - apply common sense and take appropriate safety measures, especially if running as a server.

Can I throw the

WSDL

away after generating?

Please don't. Future versions of may require you to re-generate interfaces in order to use them.

SOAP/WSDL Version and message styles

Which

SOAP / WSDL

versions does

SOAP::WSDL

support?

and and are not supported yet.

Which

SOAP

message Styles are supported?

document/literal.

The message / encoding styles rpc/encoded and rpc/literal are not supported (rpc/literal is hardly used).

rpc/literal is not implemented yet.

Unfortunately,

can't even parse many rpc/encoded definitions, and thus cannot inform you about unsupported message styles in some situations.

Aren't rpc variants bad anyway?

No. They can be as well-defined and useful as the document/literal variant.

The difference between rpc and document is that rpc

messages have an additional container named after the remote procedure called.

rpc/literal is

with named parameters, whereas rpc/encoded corresponds to positional parameters.

rpc/encoded is prohibited by the WS-I Basic Profile. However, rpc/encoded is still popular, especially for scripting languages like perl, python or php.

You should probably use SOAP::Lite for rpc/encoded web services.

All the document/rpc literal/encoded discussion will cede with

These variants are dropped in favour of an extensible operation style mechanism.

XML Parsing / Generation

Does

SOAP::WSDL

support namespaces?

Well, sort of. can use definitions containing namespaces, and emits messages with namespace information.

Its

message parser however, is not namespace sensitive but uses the pre-shared information from the for looking up what each node means.

can parse messages including namespace information up to the point where equally named elements from different namespaces may appear at the same position.

This is a long-standing feature request and will eventually be resolved.

Validation

Does perform Schema Validation?

No,

does not perform Schema Validation. It does, however, enforce the correct structure on both and perl data. Occurrence, ordering, value-spaces, and identity constraints are not checked.

Does

perform Validation?

No,

does not perform Validation (that is, validation against a ). WS-I prohibits the use of DTDs in definitions.

Isn't validation required for

?

No. The

Specification does not require validation from processors. It states how validating and non-validating parsers must react on errors.

Note: Validation in the context of (only)

actually means validation.

And doesn't

Schema require validation?

The

Schema specification requires conformant Schema processors to be able to validate Schema constraints.

is not a conformant Schema processor in this sense, as it does not validate all Schema constraints.

And does

require Schema Validation?

No. The

note does not say anything about validation. The specification explicitly states that Schema validation is not required for the envelope, and that applications may decide whether they need Schema Validation for the payload or not.

The

specification does not mandate Schema validation. It does actually not even mandate the use of Schema for type definitions.

Can

SOAP::WSDL

parse

SOAP

message fragments?

No. can parse neither well-formed nor not-well-formed message chunks.

Persistence

Can I use Storable to freeze/thaw

SOAP::WSDL

's objects?

You can freeze almost all of 's objects. The only exceptions are the objects used in parsing definitions itself - they cannot be frozen.

Note that freezing/thawing inside-out objects comes with a performance penalty and is at around the speed of

generation/parsing.

Performance and memory consumption

How fast is

SOAP::WSDL

?

As of this writing, is the fastest Client toolkit for perl available on There are no published server benchmarks yet.

If you need extra speed you can try

available from 's subversion repository at:

soap-wsdl.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/soap-wsdl/SOAP-WSDL_XS/trunk

Note however that

is not very mature yet and only suitable for use in trusted environments - you definitely should not use it on a public internet server yet.

Note further that

's inside-out objects come with a big performance penalty when freezing/thawing them with Storable.

There's a lot of perl modules generated. Don't they eat up all my memory?

usually uses a bit more memory than SOAP::Lite, but less than XML::Compile. Test if in question.