Re: PEAR::UDDI in a nutshell

Hi Alan, Alan Knowles wrote: > Can you clarify - > Is this a SOAP call ? - from the code and the UDDI website it looks > like it.. - If so, It should really be implemented using one of the SOAP > libraries.. yes, it is a SOAP call, but no, I don't think it should be implemented using one of the SOAP libraries at the moment. Let me explain why I think so: in the current version of PEAR::UDDI, we are making one SOAP call to one of the registries and basically return the result (the next release will provide methods to easily access certain portions of the result). All registries support SOAP calls via HTTP, which we use. If we however chose to use the (excellent btw.) PEAR::SOAP, we would not make our work much easier, since we would still have to assemble the data for the SOAP call "manuall". However what we would do is to add five additional dependencies to PEAR::UDDI: PEAR::SOAP and the four PEAR packages this depends on (now that I think of it: PEAR::SOAP depends on HTTP_Request which depends on Net_Socket -- so shouldn't PEAR::SOAP then also depend on Net_Socket?). At the current stage, we don't think this is worth the overhead. In the very long run, we are also considering providing a UDDI server, not just a client; then of course PEAR::SOAP or any other PEAR extension might come in very handy, I agree. There was a similar discussion about using HTTP_Request for the SOAP call, but again this would add three new dependencies (HTTP_Request, Net_Socket, Net_URL) to the package. We have not decided yet what we will do when we do more XML parsing in the next release; we might very well depend on one of the PEAR XML helper packages, however since we are looking for very specific information, we might also use regular expressions to get the desired information. Tu sum it up in a nutshell, I am not a friend of many dependencies if that doesn't make the code much easier. At the current stage, I don't see that e.g. a SOAP package would facilitate the UDDI code much, but if at a later stage it would, of course we would use it. Best, Christian