RFC: Replace SoapClient with ext-soap-engine

[veewee]

Hello There,

Would you consider merging a PR which includes https://github.com/php-soap/ext-soap-engine as a replacement for using PHP's SoapClient directly?

Some context: I am the author of phpro/soap-client. We recently created the php-soap organisation, which contains an extraction of the low-level structure of our own soap-client package. The packages inside the php-soap organisation can be used completely stand-alone and provide well-proven structures around PHP's SoapClient in order to make it as flexible as possible.

What's in it for this package:

• It makes it possible to use laravel's HTTP client to deal with the SOAP requests. PHP's soap-client has many known issues around HTTP requests: broken on chuncked encoding, not possible to load wsdl's behind authentication, advanced authentication like NTLM and Bearer tokens ...

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• By allowing an alternative HTTP layer, you can make it possible to deal with extensions like WSSE (which many soap services require).

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• It provides validation for the SoapClient $options: If you mistype, you'll get sensible feedback
• It provides abstractions for type converters and classmaps, so that you can change how soap encodes and decodes internally
• It parses the __getFunctions() and __getTypes(), so that you can actually do something with that information.
• It contains a SOAP abstraction (engine) so that in the long run, you might be possible to not depend on PHP's ext-soap implementation in the future. Benifits for that could be that the wsdl does not need to be loaded every time you want to do something with soap. (-> faster reponse times)
• ... much much more ...

I'm not a laravel expert, but looking at the code - it should not be to hard to include the basics. At first sight, including the package would especially affect these lines:

https://github.com/Ricorocks-Digital-Agency/Soap/blob/b0e5ef25515a36661d59e4df7c2cffd23edd6782/src/Request/SoapClientRequest.php#L80-L88

If you are willing to accept a PR, I am willing to try introducing the basics into this package.

[lukeraymonddowning]

Hi @veewee

That sounds really cool! Is it possible to conform to the request interface? If so, we could ship both and allow users to choose 👀

[veewee]

How would you make the request interface conform? Maybe I don't fully understand your question :)

My first idea was to keep this library completely like it is and use the ext-soap-engine to do the hard work internally instead of the SoapClient. Meaning that the way that your users configure soap remains exactly like it is. Since the options array is available during constructClient, we have all the information we'dd need to do this.

[nedwors]

Hi @veewee

First of all, thank you for offering advice and help in this project across issues 💪

It's, let's say, been a while since this was first discussed.

Where do we stand right now for bringing in the engine as you said?

We aim to bring up to a new v2 soon, (dropping old dependencies, new tooling etc) and we could aim to go into v2, or v3.

Do you have the capacity to bring #36 up to date once these updates go into the main branch?

[veewee]

Hi @nedwors,

No problem 😄

Where do we stand right now for bringing in the engine as you said?

That's up to you. This issue and the demo provided in #36 is still very relevant. I didn't go further than delivering the demo PR because there are many implementation details to be made in this package, as you can read in the comments inside that PR.

Do you have the capacity to bring https://github.com/Ricorocks-Digital-Agency/Soap/pull/36 up to date once these updates go into the main branch?

Currently a bit limited in time here. Getting the PR up to date might not be a problem. But since it's a demo of what the possibilities are, it won't be fully mergeable afterwards either. It might make more sense from the people maintaining this repository to figure out what the possibilities are and to decide how it will be implemented here. The PR contains a lot of comments with detailed information. I can imagine some of them are confusing or unkown - but I can always try to explain the things that are not clear to you or to point you in the right direction.

Would this be something that could work for you?