Archive for the 'Software Development - REALbasic' Category

iSOAP for REALbasic

Published
by
Jeremy Clifton
on November 17, 2007
in Geeky Stuff and Software Development - REALbasic
. 0 Comments

A few months back, I started to work on a project that I hoped would evolve into a cross-platform management application for a client project. The project in question stored data in the eXist XML database.

Since the app needed to be cross-platform (and I wanted it to be a GUI app) I decided to use REALbasic, which I’ve owned for about six years, despite only developing one (marginally) useful (and very simple) application (at least to completion, anyway). REALbasic is perfect for this, since I can write once and compile for OS X, Windows, and Linux.

There are several ways one can interact with the eXist database … XML-RPC, SOAP, or REST. I’ve not had much luck using REST to work with eXist, so I ruled that out. Of the other two … I’d used both XML-RPC and SOAP to interact with the data before, but REALbasic doesn’t have any sort of XML-RPC client classes that have been updated since Harding’s presidency. That left me with SOAP.

Lucky me, REALbasic has a built-in SOAP client class!

Well, not so lucky. I quickly discovered that their functionality left much to be desired, and that they set a new standard for “worst place.” No matter what I tried, my applications threw an exception with a cryptic error message (”ns1:Client.NoSOAPAction”). Furthermore, there was no way provided for me to access the actual XML data that was being exchanged, nor could I proxy the request and watch what was happening. I was at something of a dead end. Even attempts to get help via the RB mailing list and forum evoked only the sound of crickets in the night.

After much hand-wringing and lack of success with alternative methods of getting things done, I decided to bite the bullet and create my own improved SOAP classes. The result is iSOAP for REALbasic.

Once I’d gotten something working, I posted a response to my query on the RB forums and offered to share my success with anybody who needed it. This past week, I finally got a response, so I created a project site and released version 0.5 on the unsuspecting world.

Now I’ve got something to be proud of. I’ve worked with projects in Perl, PHP, Ruby, ASP, VB, and now REALbasic. Yay for me!