--- sandeep sahane wrote:
> As per my understanding of SOAP::Lite package, it is
> an wonderful package I have seen till the date. I went
> through the supports it provides and found that its
> the package that we are looking for our project.

I hope I don't offend anyone using SOAP::Lite but I'd to offer some
personal observations.

We were asked by a client over 5 years ago to provide a SOAP::Lite
client to correspond to a SOAP::Lite service to which they needed to
connect. My first question was "why does it need to be SOAP::Lite" and
the answer was that the SOAP::Lite server required a SOAP::Lite
client. This sort of defeats the whole purpose of web services
compared to proprietary protocols, but the client had a need so we
satisfied it. Observation 1: Lack of compatibility is an issue that
should have affected the choice of this tool.

The version back then was 0.55. We were recently asked to upgrade the
client server, and long story made short, getting the latest v0.71 to
work with the existing 0.55 client was beyond my skills. Advice
provided here and by Paul Kulchenko, author of SOAP::Lite led to a
solution.

Observation 2: In 5 years the software has moved from 0.55 to 0.71,
just 16 builds, not even a "release".
Observation 3: There has never been a v1.0 release.
Observation 4: To get an issue resolved I needed to commission the guy
who wrote the software, someone who is gainfully employed and doesn't
support this software for a living.
Observation 5: Perl seems to be a dead or dying language, surpassed by
PHP, Ruby, .NET, Java, and a resurgence in JavaScript. I lost a bet
there because I thought the winner was going to be Perl, but the world
moves on, and most Open Source software you see today is C, Java, and
PHP - not Perl.

So given these observations, and people are quite welcome to disagree
with my conclusions, I personally believe SOAP::Lite is _not_ a
suitable tool for new development.

Please don't confuse that with "dislike". The software works for the
most part, but if it doesn't, then you're in trouble. As mentioned
above, I've had a number of exchanges with Paul and he is very
professional and was very gracious in offering his assistance. I have
nothing but good things to say about him and the core of the software.

But as time moves on, some commercial and open source products die, and
it looks like this is one of them. So it's time to move on beyond them.

What are alternatives? .NET easily supports Web Services, client and
server, in many ways. For PHP there is NuSOAP, though there are many
issues with that too. I recommend looking at that (SourceForge) but as
with Perl and SOAP::Lite, be prepared to get into the NuSOAP code
yourself because it looks to me like that project isn't well maintained
and the author (or the one guy who supports it now) is getting burned
out.

If you're going to do web services, do not choose Open Source Software
purely because OSS is Free - as in "no cost". Choose OSS because you
know that you can take responsibility for building on the source and
improving the code. Do not choose OSS, especially an old package like
SOAP::Lite if you do not have skills with Perl or web services and you
know you're going to need to rely on other people for help. That's
asking for trouble.

Some OSS tools are high quality and have large and lively developer
teams. With those tools you have more freedom to take without giving,
but of course you should always give where possible anyway. The "Free"
part of OSS is not "free beer" or "free lunch", it means you are free
to see the code and improve on it. That will take lots of your time
with SOAP::Lite. If you have time to learn, then yes, it is also no-
cost software. If you do not, then like myself, you should be willing
to pay people to work on the code for you. For this package, I was
lucky that there was anyone qualified to work on the software.

So, my recommendation is to find software that you can maintain
yourself, that has a large development team who can maintain it for
you, and be prepared to pay people for their services when you get
stuck - especially with this package.

I hope that helps.