"'Ready to join the Web Services revolution'? However
immune you are to such marketing-driven labels, there's a valuable
technical core to Web Services (WS), and it's likely to lead to
important changes, if not a revolution. Don't let those changes
make you uneasy, though — you'll continue to find that Perl
is one of the best ways to get your work done.
The major vendors speak as though Visual Basic and Java are the
natural ways to program WS. That's only part of the story, though.
This article will show how freely available code makes it simple
and useful to write COM-WS gateways in Perl.
In fact, this is the sort of job that's easier in Perl than in
better-advertised languages. Consider the Simple Object Access
Protocol (SOAP), the principal underlying transport for WS
applications to communicate with each other. Despite the official
description of SOAP as a "lightweight" networking method, leading
SOAP toolkits weigh in around 100 MB to start. With Perl, though,
SOAP is built in to the compact popular ActivePerl distribution for
Windows and other platforms."
