[Techtalk] Open source SOAP/REST servers

[Daniel Pittman]

Kelly Jones <kelly.terry.jones at gmail.com> writes:

> I want to serve data by responding to SOAP/REST requests w/o the
> overhead of running Apache.
>
> Are there any open source SOAP/REST servers?

Are you looking for "either SOAP or REST" or "SOAP and REST" here?

> IE, lightweight servers designed to handle SOAP/REST requests, not
> HTTP requests in general?

In any case your question is at the wrong level.  For a start, REST is
about mapping the HTTP protocol verbs to data manipulation actions, so
it isn't actually possible to have a REST server that doesn't handle
"HTTP requests in general".

Also, using SOAP and using REST are ... fairly antithetical design
goals.  SOAP is a complex RPC mechanism that you can transport over
HTTP, REST is a lightweight design strategy that tries to match HTTP
verbs and data manipulation actions.[1]


Anyway, once you get past that you can find a couple of REST oriented
application server frameworks in Perl (on CPAN), and presumably also in
Python, Ruby, Java and whatever other language you please.

You can't have one of those without HTTP, though, and your server will
have to handle enough HTTP to talk to the real world — at least as much
as saying no to it.


You can also use the standard Perl SOAP modules to transport SOAP over
random protocols; the system ships with TCP, UDP and SMTP transports as
examples, and it can probably handle a bunch more.

Again, if you want to transport SOAP over HTTP you will need to handle
generic HTTP enough to reject the requests, at least.



Anyway, maybe you can tell us what your actual problem is and we can try
and help you with that?  That might be more effective than guesswork. :)

Regards,
        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  ...typically, a good implementation includes a work-around for the
     fact that the standard HTTP clients can only use three verbs, and
     only two in practice, being GET, POST, and PUT if you love pain.