Activity on the XML protocols front continues apace, with Phalanx System's WSDL wizard for COM, SSL support in pocketSOAP, XML protocol support in Applescript, and a new web services book from Wrox.

• Phalanx System's WSDL Wizard for COM supports:

  • Auto generation of WSDL for COM Objects
  • Custom generation of SOAPAction header
  • Customized operation namespaces
  • Multiple transport selection
  • Auto generation of schema for Arrays + User-defined types
  • SOAP message type configuration
  • SOAP message style configuration
  • Customization of targetNamespace for "definitions" + "schema"
  • Support for [in],[in,out],[out] parameters
  • Documentation and tutorial

• Beta 4 of Simon Fell's pocketSOAP SOAP implementation adds support for SSL. PocketSOAP is available for the whole Windows family (including Windows CE), and is licensed as open source under the Mozilla Public License.

• The newly released version of Apple's Mac OS X operating system, Mac OS X 10.1, now has the ability to make SOAP and XML-RPC requests from AppleScript, or by making calls to the AppleEvents API.

  Apple have released a document, including samples, describing this new functionality.

• Wrox have published the hydra-like Professional XML Web Services, covering topics from SOAP through to UDDI, and implementations over Java, C++, Perl, Python and PHP. Authors include XMethod's Tony Hong and Fourthought's Uche Ogbuji.