TGWebServices 1.1

TurboGears gives you a plain HTTP with JSON return values API for your application for free. This isn’t always what you want, though. Sometimes, you don’t want to expose all of the data to the web that you need to render your templates. Maybe you need to support a protocol that names the function it’s calling as part of what it POSTs such as SOAP or XML-RPC.

TGWebServices provides a super simple API for creating web services that are available via SOAP, HTTP->XML, and HTTP->JSON. The SOAP API generates WSDL automatically for your Python and even generates enough type information for statically typed languages (Java and C#, for example) to generate good client code on their end.

How easy is it?

class Multiplier(WebServicesRoot):

    @wsexpose(int)
    @wsvalidate(int, int)
    def multiply(self, num1, num2):
        return num1 * num2

With this at the root, SOAP clients can find the WSDL file at /soap/api.wsdl and POST SOAP requests to /soap/. HTTP requests to /multiply?num1=5&num2=20 will return an XML document with the result of 100. Add ?tg_format=json (or an HTTP Accept: text/javascript header) and you’ll get JSON back.

The great thing about this is that the code above looks like a ‘’’normal Python function’’’ and doesn’t know a thing about web services.