http://norman.walsh.name/2005/02/24/soaprpc-2 8 32 2005-02-24T17:13:51-05:00 $Date: 2006-07-14 10:06:19 -0400 (Fri, 14 Jul 2006) $ Norman Walsh 2005 Norman Walsh A revised SOAP RPC interface. http://norman.walsh.name/2005/02/18/witw-soaprpc I've revised my second interface to Where In The World. It's still a set of methods that you can invoke using SOAP RPC, but I've changed the methods so that they all return simple, scalar values. I'm not sure I understand how SOAP is supposed to return arrays and I'm sure I don't understand how to do it in WSDL. So the salient bits are now: The target SOAP node That's “http://norman.walsh.name/2005/02/soap/witw” (Note the change: it's “/soap/witw” where it used to be “/witw/soap”. Sorry, I know that's confusing; it's more fiddling to do with authentication that's just not important today.) That URI is for the “where is someone” services. I'm not going to re-implement the “where I am” services in SOAP unless someone actually tells me they want to use them. The namespace of the services That's “http://norman.walsh.name/witw”. I'd have made that a dated URI, but I'm using Perl’s SOAP::Lite module to do the implementation and there was some weirdness in the way that the namespace name was mapped to the Perl module name. I decided to just punt. The names of the methods They are “name”, “email”, “uri”, “latitude”, “longitude”, and “date” described below. I've decomposed things differently again to to make all the methods return simple scalars.

The name method returns the full name of the person associated with a userid: xs:string name xs:string userid UnknownUser It returns the full name of the user. If the specified userid is unknown, the service faults.

The email method returns the email address of the person associated with a userid: xs:string email xs:string userid UnknownUser It returns a hash (in the mbox_sha1sum-style of FOAF) of the user's email address. If the specified userid is unknown, the service faults.

The uri method returns the URI of the person associated with a userid: xs:string uri xs:string userid UnknownUser It returns the URI associated with a user. If the specified userid is unknown, the service faults.

The latitude and longitude methods returns information about the location of the specified userid. xs:float latitude xs:string userid UnknownUser UnknownLocation xs:float longitude xs:string userid UnknownUser UnknownLocation These methods return the latitude and longitude of the specified user, respectively. The methods fault if the userid is unknown or if the user has not specified a location.

The date method returns the when the position of the user was last updated. xs:dateTime date xs:string userid UnknownUser UnknownLocation It returns the date and time of the last time that the users position was updated. The method faults if the userid is unknown or if the user has not specified a location.

On the assumption that any who's read this far won't be scared off by a few lines of code, here's a short Perl script that returns the latitude and longitude of a user. This evening, if you pass it ndw, it tells you I'm at home: $ perl witw.soap.pl ndw Norman Walsh was last seen at 42.34N, 72.45W. That was on 2005-02-21T21:05:16Z. The brute force API still works the same way.