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What is SOAP?

The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), is a cross-platform and language-independent RPC protocol based on XML and, usually (but not necessarily) HTTP.

It uses XML to encode the information that makes the remote procedure call, and HTTP to transport that information across a network from clients to servers and vice versa.

SOAP has several advantages over other technologies like COM, CORBA etc: for example, its relatively cheap deployment and debugging costs, its extensibility and ease-of-use, and the existence of several implementations for different languages and platforms.

Please refer to our simple tutorial SOAP to understand it in detail.

This chapter makes you familiar with the SOAP implementation for Ruby (SOAP4R). This is a basic tutorial, so if you need a deep detail, you would need to refer other resources.

Installing SOAP4R

SOAP4R is the SOAP implementation for Ruby developed by Hiroshi Nakamura and can be downloaded from −

NOTE − There may be a great chance that you already have installed this component.

Download SOAP

If you are aware of gem utility then you can use the following command to install SOAP4R and related packages.

$ gem install soap4r --include-dependencies

If you are working on Windows, then you need to download a zipped file from the above location and need to install it using the standard installation method by running ruby install.rb.

Writing SOAP4R Servers

SOAP4R supports two different types of servers −

• CGI/FastCGI based (SOAP::RPC::CGIStub)
• Standalone (SOAP::RPC:StandaloneServer)

This chapter gives detail on writing a stand alone server. The following steps are involved in writing a SOAP server.

Step 1 – Inherit SOAP::RPC::StandaloneServer Class

To implement your own stand alone server you need to write a new class, which will be child of SOAP::StandaloneServer as follows −

class MyServer < SOAP::RPC::StandaloneServer
  ...............
end

NOTE − If you want to write a FastCGI based server then you need to take SOAP::RPC::CGIStub as parent class, rest of the procedure will remain the same.

Step 2 – Define Handler Methods

Second step is to write your Web Services methods, which you would like to expose to the outside world.

They can be written as simple Ruby methods. For example, let’s write two methods to add two numbers and divide two numbers −

class MyServer < SOAP::RPC::StandaloneServer
   ...............

   # Handler methods
   def add(a, b)
      return a + b
   end
   def div(a, b) 
      return a / b 
   end
end

Step 3 – Expose Handler Methods

Next step is to add our defined methods to our server. The initialize method is used to expose service methods with one of the two following methods −

class MyServer < SOAP::RPC::StandaloneServer
   def initialize(*args)
      add_method(receiver, methodName, *paramArg)
   end
end

Here is the description of the parameters −

To understand the usage of inout or out parameters, consider the following service method that takes two parameters (inParam and inoutParam), returns one normal return value (retVal) and two further parameters: inoutParam and outParam −

def aMeth(inParam, inoutParam)
   retVal = inParam + inoutParam
   outParam = inParam . inoutParam
   inoutParam = inParam * inoutParam
   return retVal, inoutParam, outParam
end

Now, we can expose this method as follows −

add_method(self, 'aMeth', [
   %w(in inParam),
   %w(inout inoutParam),
   %w(out outParam),
   %w(retval return)
])

Step 4 – Start the Server

The final step is to start your server by instantiating one instance of the derived class and calling start method.

myServer = MyServer.new('ServerName', 'urn:ruby:ServiceName', hostname, port)

myServer.start

Here is the description of required parameters −

Example

Now, using the above steps, let us write one standalone server −

require "soap/rpc/standaloneserver"

begin
   class MyServer < SOAP::RPC::StandaloneServer

      # Expose our services
      def initialize(*args)
         add_method(self, 'add', 'a', 'b')
         add_method(self, 'div', 'a', 'b')
      end

      # Handler methods
      def add(a, b)
         return a + b
      end
      def div(a, b) 
         return a / b 
      end
end
   server = MyServer.new("MyServer", 
            'urn:ruby:calculation', 'localhost', 8080)
   trap('INT){
      server.shutdown
   }
   server.start
rescue => err
   puts err.message
end

When executed, this server application starts a standalone SOAP server on localhost and listens for requests on port 8080. It exposes one service methods, add and div, which takes two parameters and return the result.

Now, you can run this server in background as follows −

$ ruby MyServer.rb&

Writing SOAP4R Clients

The SOAP::RPC::Driver class provides support for writing SOAP client applications. This chapter describes this class and demonstrate its usage on the basis of an application.

Following is the bare minimum information you would need to call a SOAP service −

• The URL of the SOAP service (SOAP Endpoint URL).
• The namespace of the service methods (Method Namespace URI).
• The names of the service methods and their parameters.

Now, we will write a SOAP client which would call service methods defined in above example, named add and div.

Here are the main steps to create a SOAP client.

Step 1 – Create a SOAP Driver Instance

We create an instance of SOAP::RPC::Driver by calling its new method as follows −

SOAP::RPC::Driver.new(endPoint, nameSpace, soapAction)

Here is the description of required parameters −

Step 2 – Add Service Methods

To add a SOAP service method to a SOAP::RPC::Driver we can call the following method using SOAP::RPC::Driver instance −

driver.add_method(name, *paramArg)

Here is the description of the parameters −

Step 3 – Invoke SOAP service

The final step is to invoice SOAP service using SOAP::RPC::Driver instance as follows −

result = driver.serviceMethod(paramArg...)

Here serviceMethod is the actual web service method and paramArg… is the list parameters required to pass in the service method.

Example

Based on the above steps, we will write a SOAP client as follows −

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w

require 'soap/rpc/driver'

NAMESPACE = 'urn:ruby:calculation'
URL = 'http://localhost:8080/'

begin
   driver = SOAP::RPC::Driver.new(URL, NAMESPACE)
   
   # Add remote sevice methods
   driver.add_method('add', 'a', 'b')

   # Call remote service methods
   puts driver.add(20, 30)
rescue => err
   puts err.message
end

Further Readings

I have explained you just very basic concepts of Web Services with Ruby. If you want to drill down it further, then there is following link to find more details on Web Services with Ruby.