Question

I’m investigating using a scripting language in order to call a web service that handles documents in a repository database. I’m thinking about powershell or perl, but I don’t have much experience with using scripts to call web services.

As far as the api’s, they are mostly just get/put operations for the files and the files are xml based.

We are looking at scripts as something that would be easy to use, compact code, portable, and rapid implementation.

The script has to run on windows boxes, XP I think, and the document file transfers are going to be very large due to embeded graphics in the documents, like around 10gbs.

Does anyone have any experience with this and has a recommendation, based on the above items?

Answer 1

I’m a bit biased because I’m a Java developer, but you ought to consider Groovy. It works seamlessly with the rest of the Java stack, but has dynamic syntax. If you are doing REST you can do something like this (GET example):

def response = "FULL_URL_STRING_WITH_PARAMS".toURL().text

That will take a string, convert it to a URL, fetch it and put the response in a string named response in a single line. Groovy has a lot of things like that for handling networking code and its XML and JSON APIs are really slick. For example, this is how you would parse a XML response (using RSS as an example):

def rssFeed = new XmlSlurper().parseText(response)
rssFeed.channel.item.each { item ->
    println "${item.title} ${item.pubDate}"
}

The JsonSlurper works the same way with raw JSON output.