Introduction

SOAP is a lightweight protocol intended for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment. Groovy has a SOAP implementation based on
Xfire which allows you to create a SOAP server and to make calls on remote SOAP servers.

Installation

 You just need to download this jar file in your ${user.home}/.groovy/lib directory.

Example

The Server

You can develop your web service using a groovy script and/or a groovy class. The following two groovy files are valid for building a web-service.

1. MathService.groovy
2. You can also using something more Groovy
3. Then the easy part ... no need for comments
   That's all !

The Client

1. Oh ... you want to test it ... two more lines.
2. You're done!

More Information

Current limitations (and workaround)

1. No authentication (see JIRA issue 1457)
2. No proxy support (see JIRA issue 1458)
3. It looks like the XFire dynamic client does not support complex datatypes. This may be a concern if you need for example to transfer an Image as a byte array. The workaround I use is to transform this in a String an transfer that String - As this is a bit painful I am investigating moving to the regular XFire client. Here is a little program demo-ing this (look at this "disco age" image - Is Groovy that old ?

The client (ImageClient.groovy)

The (ugly) server part embedding the image which is Base64 encoded (ImageServer.groovy):

and the missing and secred part is here.

Demos with public web services

There exist a lot of web-services available for testing. One which is pretty easy to evaluate is the currency rate calculator from webservicex.net.
Here is a small swing sample that demonstrate the use of the service. Enjoy !

And here is the result: