Recipe 18.13 Writing a SOAP Server

18.13.1 Problem

You want to write a web service where SOAP is the transport.

18.13.2 Solution

Use the SOAP-Lite distribution from CPAN. Your server can be either standalone:

use SOAP::Transport::HTTP;

$daemon = SOAP::Transport::HTTP::Daemon
          ->new(LocalPort => $PORT)
          ->dispatch_to('ClassName')
          ->handle( );

or a CGI script:

use SOAP::Transport::HTTP;

$daemon = SOAP::Transport::HTTP::CGI
          ->dispatch_to('ClassName')
          ->handle( );

In both cases, the only methods that SOAP clients are permitted to invoke are those in the classes named in the argument to dispatch_to (those classes will be required if not already loaded):

package ClassName;

sub handler {
  my ($class, $arg_hash_ref) = @_;
  # ...
}

18.13.3 Discussion

The SOAP-Lite toolkit contains SOAP and XML-RPC modules. Writing a SOAP service is similar to writing an XML-RPC service. Control method dispatch in SOAP as in XML-RPC. See Recipe 18.11 for details.