Calling a Web Service from Perl

How to call a Web Service from Perl that returns XML

[agentalpha]

I'm trying to figure out how to call a web service (REST type) from a CGI Perl file. The web service returns XML so I would also need to know the best way to pull data out of the returned XML.

The call to the web service would be a URL call like:
[theCallingSiteUrl.com...]

Any ideas?

[Dabrowski]

I was actually messing with this today, Yahoo have an SDK that includes PERL that does exactly that, queries using REST and returns XML.

Wasn't Yahoo you were doing was it?

It's on [developer.yahoo.com...] somewhere but the site seems to be down at the moment.

[rocknbil]

Many don't like it because it's slow (although most of my requests are semi-instantaneous,) but I've never had any problem with XML::Simple. Easy to install too, doesn't need to be cpann'ed (but that's best.)

[phranque]

if you are asking about how to HTTP GET the document in a perl way you could use something like:

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;

my $agent = LWP::UserAgent->new(env_proxy => 1,keep_alive => 1, timeout => 30);
my $url = "http://www.theCallingSiteUrl.com/webservice?param1=t1&param2=t2";
my $header = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url);
my $request = HTTP::Request->new('GET', $url, $header);
my $response = $agent->request($request);

if ($response->is_success){
[do something with] $response->content;
}

[spikey]

I use XML::Simple most of the time but often need XML::Writer to get some complex structures into the right format.
SOAP::Lite is also quite useful for WSDL.
You can convert a chunk of XML into a data structure (of hashes & arrays) using:
my $data = XMLin($xml);

[Dabrowski]

Thanks for the heads up spikey, I'll check that one out for my project.

[agentalpha]

Using the HTTP::Request / LWP::UserAgent to make the call and then XML::Simple to process it seems to work pretty well.

Thanks for the help!