Does anybody out there know of web services available
for public use?
I have to knock up a SOAP client to talk to weblogic
and I would like to just netcat a SOAP request to a free
webservice just to get a feel of what's going on.

There's WL documentation but it's so dry and obfuscated
(to make itself look clever)
when as I understand(?) its a simple process.

A webservice and a nice example SOAP envelope would be nice

Hi -

I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for ...

... but Google has lots of neat developer stuff.

Including (I'm sure) some very simple "hello world" type examples you can try out.

All SOAP, all Web-services based. You might want to take a look around here:

http://code.google.com/

Just a thought .. PSM

PS:
Please pardon the anachronistic and totally embarassing use of the adjective "neat" ;-)

thanks very much, that's a very useful looking site.

There's loads of stuff out there but everyone is bigging themselves up
using marketing speak like "leveraging your legacy data api throughput procuctizing potential" when
I 'm sure you just squirt some XML at a port and read what comes back.

gets on my nerves it do

I suppose WebLogic is using Java as development platform. If so, I suggest you take a look at Apache Axis or Apache Soap or XFire to call the WebLogic Web Service.

Read a little bit about wsdl and about webservices calls and the rest should be easy.

1)You find the Wsdl file
2)You choose the api you want to use to create the webservice client
3)You create the webservice client and invoke the webservice and do what you have to do with the result of the code invocation.

Thanks paulsm4, I found some really swell stuff on the google code site.
They have some nice testable webservices to use and examples.

I was up and running the same day.

Thanks mrcheeks, i only just spotted your reply. I have got to the stage of
using netcat to directly squirt into google's webservice so I get
an understanding of how it works. This simple solution works too.

I will look into your suggestions, I have already
tried perl SOAP::Lite.

It seems strange how much I had to download from cpan just to squirt a tiny data
file into a port ?
I thought the idea was that it was supposed to be simple!

oh well, what do I know

Yeah, the idea is to have it simple

Have a look at this blog for a funny discussion around this "simplicity": http://wanderingbarque.com/noninters...ds-for-simple/

I like it Jilliagre.

I thought I was crazy: the only person who hates XML.
(actually it's quite groovy when kept simple - AND THEN the marketing people tell
the bosses we need it, and jeez)

You may want to look at XINS

Billy,
If you're going to be doing this a lot, there are a couple of Perl books:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pwebserperl/ aka Programming Web Services with Perl
and http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlxml/ aka Perl and XML.
Maybe you can talk the boss into coughing up some cash....

Cheers chris and seagull, probably not going to do to much more in the near future.
I worked myself a simple solution now that works ok without having to go through
the hassle of getting permission to install stuff on our production servers.
It's really so simple, using just netcat (i snuck that on ok though) just create the
http header and soap message and bang it off then read on stdout, simple so simple.

Why are there so many tools making it so complicated? search me.