[SOLVED] Creating web services

[NerdyJane]

I am new to Linux and the Apache server.

I have been assigned a task to figure out how to create web services for the Apache server.

Please give me some pointers on how to get started.

What tools do I need to start writing a web service to (for e.g.) convert temperature, entered in Celsius, to Fahrenheit.

[jledhead]

perl, python, php, any would be good choices

php convert celsius to fahrenheit - Google Search

google is your friend also so you can try and find examples.

[NerdyJane]

Thanks, jledhead.

I looked for web service programming using perl. But I couldn't find much. I'm still looking.

Any link or information on how to create a SOAP web service using PERL?

[aram535]

If you're going to get involved in SOAP and SOAP actions you're better off using an existing framework like Apache Axis2 - go to ws.apache.org/axis2 at least to start with.

You can do it with PERL, but I'm not sure of an easy framework to get you up and running fast.

[NerdyJane]

Thanks aram535.

I dropped the PERL idea when I didn't find much help on google.

But I came across gSOAP and am trying that now.

I have now run the gSOAP toolkit on one of the examples and have a bunch of .xml files and a .wsdl file along with a client and server application file (with no extension).

Where I'm stuck at now is that I cannot follow what to do with these files now.

I know that .wsdl and the server application files go on the web server (root). I don't know how to invoke it. So I tried addressing it directly from the web browser and it returned a SOAP message with (expected) client fault - Found EOF or no data.

So I guess I have (most of) the pieces but don't know what to do with them now.

[aram535]

I'm not familiar with gSOAP, but from the question it sounds like you need a WebServices primer.

From the sounds of it, you need to do several things -- this is rather a complex task and it really can't be done via "research" like most other things, because any article or snippet of code you find will start off way above your current knowledge base, it isn't as easy as cut-n-paste or linking in existing code.

1. Install and learn basic Tomcat
2. Install and learn basic Axis2
3. Learn Java
4. Learn XML
5. Build and test several different SOAP clients.
(national weather, google, yahoo, all have soap servers that you can use to test your clients).
6. Now you can build your first soap server.

I think that should give you some thought on the amount of work ahead, but don't be discouraged. Many have tried and done this fairly quickly.

[NerdyJane]

Thanks, aram535.

It was a little intimidating to see the number of technologies I need to learn for this.

I found some documentation on gSOAP that helped me develop and deploy a client-server pair on my local server and test it out.

Thanks.