This chapter presents some interesting Python recipes on web services using three different approaches, namely, XML Remote Procedure Call (XML-RPC), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and Representational State Transfer (REST). The idea behind the web services is to enable an interaction between two software components over the web through a carefully designed protocol. The interface is machine readable. Various protocols are used to facilitate the web services.
Here, we bring examples from three commonly used protocols. XML-RPC uses HTTP as the transport medium, and communication is done using XML contents. A server that implements XML-RPC waits for a call from a suitable client. The client calls that server to execute remote procedures with different parameters. XML-RPC is simpler and comes with a minimum security in mind. On the other hand, SOAP has a rich set...