Python & XML

A Web Application

In this section, you develop a web site that is integrated with the XML Switch and the other systems running on your network (even if you’re putting this all on one machine). In this web application, a user navigates through some HTML on the server, allowing them to login (in other words, retrieve their profile), edit their profile information, or view special offers. A CGI script runs next to the HTML, and is called by the HTML forms and other items to retrieve the information.

Typically, a web site or CGI script accesses a database directly to pull information out on behalf of a user. However, this application is different. In this web site example, the CGI script uses the xsc client created earlier to talk directly with the XML Switch. So instead of SQL queries, the web site submits XML messages to the switch. The switch then maps these to objects and invokes the correct method, resulting in the right information being either inserted or pulled back from the XML Switch. The returned information is then parsed and formatted into HTML, and displayed back to the user.

Connecting to a Web Service

This is how many web services may first be implemented. For example, with Microsoft’s forthcoming web services (codenamed HailStorm), an independent business should be able to create a web site, as well as retrieve your user’s HailStorm calendar by issuing SOAP calls from your web server (or the client) to Microsoft’s services. The returned XML is then formatted by your ...