From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@...>
Date: 2005-11-13T12:58:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby, SOAP and WSDL

On 11/10/05, jansenh <henning.jansen@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi group, this is another RubyNewbie...
>
> 1.
> I want to write a SOAP server based on an existing WSDL specification.
> Coming from .Net I have only solved SOAP issues (once) by using
> autogenerated code from WSDL's. And there is no such thing in Ruby if I
> understand correctly. What is the approach to manually creating a SOAP
> server interface accoring to a WSDL?
>
> 2.
> While searching around in this forum I found this statement: "Dyanamic
> languages like Ruby don't really need WSDL,".
> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/thread/c0fbd6dfceab4c0/5c58c7f75865937d?q=generate+server+wsdl&rnum=4#5c58c7f75865937d
>
> Why?

I'm not a SOAP or WSDL expert so I can't answer your first question,
but as for your second:

Dynamic languages like Ruby don't need something like WSDL because
method calls can be intercepted and/or created on the fly. There is no
need for hard interfaces or static declarations that languages like
Java or C++ would need. For more information read the documentation
for the Ruby methods called "method_missing" and "define_method", and
also take a look at Ruby's distributed object library called DRb.

Ryan