Writing a SOAP Server

Table of contents:

Credit: Kevin Marshall

Problem

You want to host a SOAP-based web service using a standalone server (that is, not as part of a Rails application).

Solution

Building your own SOAP server really only requires three simple steps:

Subclass the SOAP::StandaloneServer class. In the constructor, register the methods you want to expose and the arguments they should take. Here we expose a method sayhelloto method that expects one parameter, username:
```
	require soap/rpc/standaloneServer

	class MyServer < SOAP::RPC::StandaloneServer
	 def initialize(*args)
	 super
	 add_method(self, sayhelloto, username)
	 end
	end
```

Define the methods you exposed in step 1:

	class MyServer
	 def sayhelloto(username)
	 "Hello, #{username}."
	 end
	end

Finally, set up and start your server. Our example server runs on port 8888 on localhost. Its name is "CoolServer" and its namespace is "urn:mySoapServer":
```
	server = MyServer.new(CoolServer,urn:mySoapServer,localhost,8888)
	trap(INT) { server.shutdown }
	server.start
```
We trap interrupt signals so that we can stop our server from the command line.

Discussion

Weve now built a complete SOAP server. It uses the SOAP StandaloneServer and hosts one simple sayhelloto method that can be accessed at "http://localhost:8888/sayhelloto" with a namespace of "urn:mySoapServer".

To test your service, start your server in one Ruby session and then use the simple script below in another Ruby session to call the method it exposes:

	require soap/rpc/driver
	driver = SOAP::RPC::Driver.new(http://localhost:8888/, urn:mySoapServer)
	driver.add_method(sayhelloto, username)
	driver.sayhelloto(Kevin) # => "Hello, Kevin."

Problem

Solution

Discussion

See Also