[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Calling XML Web Services - Best Practices?

[Brandon W. Uhlman]

Hi, all.

I'm writing an EG plugin for added content from Baker and Taylor's  
Content Café.

The way their content is obtained is by POSTING a well-formed XML  
document to a given URL, and received a well-formed XML document in  
return. Both the document to submit and the received document have a  
XSD schema available defining them.

The naïve way to do this would be to hand-construct (or  
programmatically construct, but in a very manual way) the valid XML  
and push it off to the site in question, and then to parse the output  
through XML::Simple or XPath or some other XML parser and pick out the  
pieces I need.

I think the approach above would work, but I'm a real web services  
n00b, and I feel like there has to be a better way. And I just don't  
know what it is.

Can anyone give me some pointers?

Brandon

======================================
Brandon W. Uhlman, Systems Consultant
Public Library Services Branch
British Columbia Ministry of Education
Vancouver, BC (and Lillooet, BC)

Phone: (604) 660-2972 or (250) 256-0344
E-mail: brandon.uhlman at gov.bc.ca
         brandon.uhlman at bclibrary.ca