Web Services

Web services can be generally regarded as functions or functionality of applications or systems exposed over the Web using standardised message formats and typically interfaced to other software using traditional APIs, although "message-centric" usage of such services is also possible and may be favoured by certain technologies.

JSON-RPC

[https://json-rpc.org/ JSON-RPC] is an increasingly popular Web Services specification that uses the light-weight [https://json.org/ JSON] (JavaScript Object Notation) data-interchange format (in comparison to the protocols listed below, which all use XML). JSON-RPC was created in 2004 and implementations exist in JavaScript, Java, PHP and Perl (among other languages) in addition to Python.

• [https://json-rpc.org/wiki/python-json-rpc python-json-rpc] The specification website includes a Python implementation.

• [https://pypi.python.domainunion.de/pypi/JsonUtils/ JsonUtils] is another library that supports JSON-RPC.

SOAP

["SOAP"] is a Web services technology favoured in certain environments. The following projects seek to support SOAP and related technologies such as WSDL:

• [https://sourceforge.net/projects/pywebsvcs ZSI] (Zolera Soap Infrastructure) - a version of the actively maintained [https://sourceforge.net/projects/pywebsvcs Python Web Services] project; ZSI-2.0 Released on 2007-02-02 provides both client and server SOAP libraries. Newly added was proper WSDL consumption of complex types into python classes.

• [https://python.domainunion.de/pypi/soaplib soaplib] - a more recently established Web services library; at this time, this library is best used for publishing SOAP services since WSDL consumption is not part of the library

• [https://fedorahosted.org/suds suds] - Suds is a lightweight SOAP python client that provides a service proxy for Web Services.

XML-RPC

The first popular and largely standardised Web services technology was [wiki:XmlRpc XML-RPC], supported in Python by the following libraries:

• xmlrpclib - found in the standard library

XMPP

More in common with the message-centric usage of ["SOAP"], [https://www.xmpp.org/ XMPP] - an Internet standard which provides the foundation for the Jabber instant messaging technology - could be used as a Web services protocol. See ["PythonXml"] for details of suitable projects.

Editorial Note

The above lists should be arranged in ascending alphabetical order - please respect this when adding new solutions. When specifying release dates please use the format YYYY-MM-DD.