Web Services
Web services can be generally regarded as functions or functionality of applications or systems exposed over the Web using standardised message formats and typically interfaced to other software using traditional APIs, although "message-centric" usage of such services is also possible and may be favoured by certain technologies.
JSON-RPC
JSON-RPC is an increasingly popular Web Services specification that uses the light-weight JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data-interchange format (in comparison to the protocols listed below, which all use XML). JSON-RPC was created in 2004 and implementations exist in JavaScript, Java, PHP and Perl (among other languages) in addition to Python.
python-json-rpc The specification website includes a Python implementation.
JsonUtils is another library that supports JSON-RPC.
SOAP
SOAP is a Web services technology favoured in certain environments. The following projects seek to support SOAP and related technologies such as WSDL:
ZSI (Zolera Soap Infrastructure) - a version of the actively maintained Python Web Services project; ZSI-2.0 Released on 2007-02-02 provides both client and server SOAP libraries. Newly added was proper WSDL consumption of complex types into python classes.
soaplib - Soaplib is an easy to use python library for writing and calling soap web services. Webservices written with soaplib are simple, lightweight, work well with other SOAP implementations, and can be deployed as WSGI applications.
suds - Suds is a lightweight SOAP python client that provides a service proxy for Web Services.
XML-RPC
The first popular and largely standardised Web services technology was XML-RPC, supported in Python by the following libraries:
- xmlrpclib - found in the standard library
XMPP
More in common with the message-centric usage of SOAP, XMPP - an Internet standard which provides the foundation for the Jabber instant messaging technology - could be used as a Web services protocol. See PythonXml for details of suitable projects.
Editorial Note
The above lists should be arranged in ascending alphabetical order - please respect this when adding new solutions. When specifying release dates please use the format YYYY-MM-DD.