Chapter Roadmap | XML and Perl

This chapter discusses web services and some of the Perl facilities that support them. First, I'll discuss web services in general and how they are transforming the World Wide Web and all its applications. Then, I'll briefly touch on several of the web service protocols available. Finally, I'll discuss the two most important and widely used web- related protocols, the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and XML-Remote Procedure Protocol (XML-RPC).

The SOAP discussion includes examples built with the SOAP::Lite module, which is the SOAP implementation module that includes some additional functionality. Examples include a SOAP daemon and client, as well as a section on using SOAP::Lite with web service applications that utilize the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).

XML-RPC is another protocol for web services, and it will be discussed using examples that utilize the Frontier::RPC Perl module. I'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both SOAP and XML-RPC and give you a good background that will allow you to choose the right approach for your implementation.