Perl Socket Test Program for HTTP and SOAP

<< Herong's Tutorial Notes on Web Service and SOAP

This chapter provides tutorial notes and example codes on the Perl socket test program for HTTP and SOAP communications. Topics include writing a simple Perl socket test program; sending HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1 requests; sending SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2 requests; fixing the issue caused by Content-Length; testing GetSpeech Web service.

SocketRequestResponse.pl - Socket Level Testing Program

Examples of HTTP 1.0 Requests and Responses

Examples of HTTP 1.1 Requests and Responses

SOAP 1.1 Request - Content-Length Too Small

SOAP 1.1 Request - Content-Length Too Large

SOAP 1.1 Request and Response of GetSpeech

SOAP 1.2 Request and Response of GetSpeech

Conclusions:

• A simple Perl socket program, SocketRequestResponseBinary.pl, can be used to send both HTTP and SOAP requests to remote servers.
• Very few Web servers support HTTP 1.0 as of 2009.
• HTTP 1.1 request requires a the "Host" header line.
• www.xmlme.com provides a public Web service, GetSpeech, that supports both SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2.
• The "Content-Length" header line must provides the exact number of bytes in the request content. This is very important.
• The binmode() function should be used to read files in binary mode to avoid \r\n to \n conversion.