[Laszlo-user] Perl Catalyst

[Geoff Crawford]

At 09:50 PM 6/3/2007, Henry Minsky wrote:

>Hi, I'm doing the most current work on the RPC libraries in the SWF 
>and DHTML runtimes.
>There are a bunch of good issues you've raised, I'll try to address 
>some of them
>and give an overview of what the plans are. I cc'd this discussion 
>to Laszlo-Dev as well.
>

Thanks Henry, great to meet you.


>1. just going to some plain XMLHttpRequest code - are you aware
>the DHTML version of XMLHttpRequest is broken?  I'm playing in
>SWF and working code complains about using lz.XMLHttpRequest
>because it's duplicating the name??  I can give you details
>and file a bug report if need be.
>
>
>Please file a bug report, thanks!

You got it.

>I'd like to leave the native DHTML XMLHTTPRequest, and rename the 
>pseudo-XMLHTTPRequest class that is in SWF, or at least make people 
>use the 'lz' prefix, so there is no warning or shadowing
>going on.

That would work for me.


>I'll post a separate message to laszlo-dev which outlines how the 
>current system works.
>Briefly, it does do some XML serialization on the client to format 
>the SOAP request.
>Then the message is passed to the server, which relies on the apache 
>axis library on the server to implement the SOAP transaction with 
>the back-end, and then that response is encoded as SWF byte code 
>(for Flash) or  JSON (for DHTML) and sent back to the client.
>Some namespace issues may better be dealt with on the server end 
>than on the client.
>
>What I'd really like to see is an implementation of the SOAP 
>protocol entirely in Javascript, that could be ported to LZX. That 
>would  get the LPS server and Apache-axis out of the loop entirely. 
>This would allow SOLO  apps to be SOAP clients. (And I'd like to do 
>that with XMLRPC as well, which should be an order of magnitude 
>easier than the SOAP client implementation).

It depends on what you mean by SOAP protocol - is it really SOAP
which is just the passing of XML back and forth, or is it
the WSDL analysis which is the tough part.  I believe it's Java,
not JavaScript, but soapui.org makes my tester that produces
the write WSDL all the time.  You might get code good enough
to port from there.  I believe it's open source, but you'd
need to check up on that.  I know their tool is free.

>I've been looking around to see if anyone has implemented an
>open source SOAP client in Javascript, but so far haven't found 
>anything that is even close to compliant with the spec. I'd be 
>interested if you know of anything that looks promising in that area?

What we've been doing is reasonably good for own purposes that
builds some basic XML and does XMLHttpRequest.  But it doesn't
use the WSDL to produce it.  I've gotten the J/S rewritten into
Laszlo's version of XMLHttpRequest - just finishing those pieces
but they run only in SWF at the moment for the reasons stated.

>The LPS server  is currently using a fairly old version of the 
>apache axis and related utility libraries. There are some SOAP bugs 
>that may be fixed by moving to a more recent apache axis and related 
>utility libraries, but the apache APIs have drifted a lot, so this 
>is not trivial.

Yeah, unfortunately that's out of my league.  And an old version
of SOAP would definitely explain it.  Looks like that's probably
another possibility off the list.  It's still in the works, but
I'm thinking my XMLHttpRequest code is going to be the winner
if we can get that working on DHTML.

Thanks for the notes.


=====================================================================
Geoff Crawford                           Phone:      (973) 361 - 4224
Innov8 Computer Solutions, LLC           FAX:        (973) 537 - 6946
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Randolph NJ 07869                        Web: http://www.innov8cs.com

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