[Fedora-suds-list] SoapClient feature request

Waldemar Osuch waldemar.osuch at gmail.com
Wed Nov 12 03:07:09 UTC 2008


Hi,

Thank you for a modern SOAP client library.  Prospects of talking to
SOAP services from Python were very bleak before suds showed up on the
horizon.

The library is very useful as it is but there is one implementation
detail that if changed could make it even more useful.  I'm talking
about the reliance on urllib2 for sending the actual http requests.
Since urllib2 throws away a connection after each request is finished
it makes it much harder to implement NTLM authentication on top of it.

Why NTLM you ask?  It is used by default on all those Sharepoint sites
that seem to spread all over place.
And unfortunately they will not go away anytime soon.  Not at my work
place at least.

I have even written my own SOAP client library so I can talk them.
It is inspired by your API but it is based on lxml[1] for all the XML
wrangling and httplib2[2] for all the
request/response/authentication/cookies stuff.

It can handle a subset of WSDL and it works fairly well for the
services I have to talk to.
It will never will be as general as yours but it can handle NTLM
authentication thanks to httplib2 and a plugin I wrote.  Currently the
plugin works only on windows because it depends on pywin32 being
installed.

What do you think about switching the transport to httplib2?
It is an extra dependency but it makes http handling easier.
Or maybe one could come up with a simple interface and make the
transport pluggable?
With pluggable transport one could use pycurl[3] and have cross
platform NTLM authentication solution.

Thoughts?

[1] - http://codespeak.net/lxml/
[2] - http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/
[3] - http://pycurl.sourceforge.net/




More information about the fedora-suds-list mailing list