SOAPjr

Traditional SOAP is no longer the Simple Object Access Protocol it was 
initially designed to be. It's bloated and overly verbose making it 
bandwidth hungry and slow. It's also based on XML, making it expensive 
to parse and manipulate - especially on mobile or embedded clients. 
However, it's core Envelope/Head/Body design pattern is really useful 
for AJAX style API's.

SOAPjr uses a similar Envelope/Head/Body model, but instead of bloated 
and verbose XML it uses lightweight and easy to manipulate JSON. 
After all, there's no X in SOAP and it's Envelope/Head/Body concept 
is not bound in any way to requiring XML.

In contrast to SOAP, JR (JSON-RPC) is overly simplistic and basically 
tunnels HTTP GET style key/value pairs within a query string using JSON. 
However, within JR there is no Head/Body separation leaving metadata 
to pollute the main data space.

SOAPjr combines the best of these two concepts and is designed to 
create modern AJAX API's that can easily be used by mobile devices, 
embedded systems or PC browsers.

So how does this make building AJAX API's any easier? 
Getting a browser to talk to make XMLHttpRequest calls is easy enough. 
But the complex part is defining what data structures each request and 
response will contain, and debugging invisible requests to find out if 
it's an HTTP transport error, a Server error, a JSON parser error or a 
web server or DB error. SOAPjr makes all of this simple by providing a 
simple and clean framework and associated data structures.

SOAPjr even let's you work with and extend common data models across 
specific domains (e.g. contacts, calendars, payments, etc.) helping 
standardise API's even further. 

A common model would be to use POSH, CSS and Microformats at the 
presentation layer bound together with a Javascript toolkit like jQuery. 
SOAPjr is the glue between the browser and the Server, and on the 
Server-side you can use Perl, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby or any HTTP 
aware language. 

These modules are an example of a pre-built SOAPjr toolkits in Perl.

So if you want to create clean, fast AJAX API's then 
SOAPjr is what you've been looking for. 



INSTALLATION

To install this module, run the following commands:

	perl Makefile.PL
	make
	make test
	make install


SUPPORT AND DOCUMENTATION

After installing, you can find documentation for this module with the
perldoc command.

    perldoc SOAPjr

You can also look for information at:

    SOAPjr.org
        http://SOAPjr.org

    RT, CPAN's request tracker
        http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?Dist=SOAPjr

    AnnoCPAN, Annotated CPAN documentation
        http://annocpan.org/dist/SOAPjr

    CPAN Ratings
        http://cpanratings.perl.org/d/SOAPjr

    Search CPAN
        http://search.cpan.org/dist/SOAPjr/


TODO

Need to write t/ tests and add detailed documentation then replace t/pod-coverage.t.

Also need to create Server and Client modules ala JSON::RPC and more detailed example scripts.


COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Copyright (C) 2008 Rob Manson, Sean McCarthy and 
http://SOAPjr.org, some rights reserved.

This file is part of SOAPjr.

SOAPjr is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

SOAPjr is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with SOAPjr.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

