Call SOAP Web services with AJAX

Filed in archive Web Services on October 11, 2005

I try hard not to simply regurgitate news articles I see everyday and post they to my blog. I figure that an average Internet user could find these articles without my help. An example of this being the JavaRSS site which has more links to more Java related news items than a person will know what to do with.

The title of this post comes from one such article I found on the above-mentioned site. It simply contained too many buzzwords for me to pass by with first reading and then blogging about. The folks over at IBM developerWorks are doing good work. This recent article Call SOAP Web services with AJAX is a good example of that work.

One thing I will say about the article is that the amount of JavaScript involved in performing such an operation seems excessive. Not only does a developer have to write the normal AJAX related JavaScript for evoking and parsing functions but they also have to create the SOAP envelope and populate it.

It reminds me of the days back when I worked for Click2Learn.com and worked with JavaScript for days.... weeks... on end trying to get navigation and DHTML layers to work correctly. Then I would go to a client's office and give a technical presentation. It would be in front of a dozen IT folks and I would encounter a bug during the presentation because the version of browser was Netscape 4.0512343 (or something) and we hadn't tested that version. It gives me the willies just thinking about it.