Talks

Why Web Services Are Painful In Perl And Why We Should Care - Jonathan Stowe
Thursday, The Onion Room, 945, 20 mins

This is a further episode in my ongoing mumble about web services.

Because of Perl's dynamic nature it makes it rather difficult to share "objects" with web services made in different languages. The web services toolkits that we have available in Perl don't make it easy to understand web services messages from services or clients written in different languages either.

WSDL (Web Service Description Language) is a mechanism to enable interoperability between systems without prior knowledge of the underlying architecture providing the service. Whilst now we can work around the difficulty in mapping the "types" described in a WSDL document, largely by ignoring it, if Perl is to have a part in the SOA (service oriented architecture) plans, that the major software vendors are setting forth, then it will need to interoperate more strongly with the systems that currently support these standards.

The understanding of WSDL and the accurate passing of document/literal messages is mandated by a number of recent and important standards such as BPEL (business process execution language) and up coming WS- orchestration standards.

The talk will discuss the ways that Perl currently fails to support the de facto standards and the reasons for this, and will go on to sketch out how this lack might be fixed. In passing the reason that REST and other ad-hoc "standards" do not fill the ticket will be discussed.