Can SOAP/RSS be served by XSLT transform?

Rails
1

Hello, I was thinking about have a generic backend (models) that returns
XML, this XML is then transformed in to XHTML, SOAP, RSS depending on
what is required by the client, using XSLT templates. Can SOAP be
constructed in this way? Or do I need I need specific fuctionality to
deliver web services?

I know of Rails web services which now seem to be defunct in place of
the more RESTful way of doing things… But I already have a requirment
for XML output so I was thinking of going down the above route.

Any pitfalls?

Many thanks, K.

2

Kris wrote:

Hello, I was thinking about have a generic backend (models) that returns
XML, this XML is then transformed in to XHTML, SOAP, RSS depending on
what is required by the client, using XSLT templates. Can SOAP be
constructed in this way? Or do I need I need specific fuctionality to
deliver web services?

I know of Rails web services which now seem to be defunct in place of
the more RESTful way of doing things… But I already have a requirment
for XML output so I was thinking of going down the above route.

Any pitfalls?

Many thanks, K.

Is this more suited for asking on the Ruby forum, since it is not
exactly Rails specific? Maybe it does not fit in with the Rails way of
doing things. I would however modify/extend the basic Rails setup to
allow XSLT and a XML backend…

3

You can certainly use rails to generate XML instead of XHTML. We did
exactly that, and had an after_filter that ran it through Xalan to turn
it into XHTML.

No idea about whether you can do it with soap though, I don’t know
enough about the details of SOAP. ActionWebService is pretty easy to
work with though and you should be able to share almost all of the code.

Fred

4

You could do things this way, but it’s not clear to me why you
wouldn’t just use Rails’ Web services.

As I understand it, AWS isn’t going to disappear - it just may turn
into an add-on rather than remaining part of the core Rails package.
For those (apparently few) of us who use it, AWS is a really powerful,
elegant way of working; REST makes it simpler to create simple XML
documents, but the effort involved in turning those documents into
SOAP or XML-RPC is pretty painful if you code it yourself.

Regards

Dave M.