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Comment by White_N_Nerdy | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have any info on using Node.js server code to talk to SOAP services?

Do you have an specific SOAP API in mind, or do you want a generic "SOAP sink" powered by Node? If the former, you can get away with your own lousy in-house implementation (2 pages of javascript, really.) If you want a full blown SOAP client implementation, including WSDL parsing, you better hope there exists something already.

My recommendation, as the developer of a SOAP client/server library; don't bother. Use Java or PHP, as those have the best SOAP libs out there, and figure out a way to pipe SOAP requests through your own java/php "proxy" app and let those libs take care of the cruft.

Using Node for SOAP is sacrilege. The two are diametrically opposed in their philosophies, and SOAP will easily negate any performance gains you might have made from using an event-drive server.

Thanks for the advice. I just wanted to use Node as a way of "pushing" events down to the browser, but the only way Node will know if an event has happened or not is by polling a particular SOAP service. I do own the SOAP service though, so I suppose that I could add a new interface and let Node just connect with TCP?

What's the standard way of doing RPC between Node an other types of services?

I got the answer on IRC. Basically, you either make your non-Node servers push events to Node.js using Http OR you use something like AMQP. browser -> node.js -> AMQP -> JEE and then JEE -> AMQP -> node.js -> browser.

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