The return of the WebService Demos for Delphi XE (SOAP)

Delphi SOAP programming was a hot-topic in 2002. And Delphi 7, the current release at the time, was shipping with a series of webservice demos. These were still part of the product until Delphi 2007, and Delphi 2010. These days REST+JSON is a bigger deal than SOAP,but SOAP is still an incredibly important part of the "business integration" layer of the internet. My employer's products give me a first-hand view of the importance of SOAP. It will remain an important part of internet-based B2B connectivity, for the future. Yes, JSON+REST will also be used, but Delphi developers these days need to know both, because eventually someone will need a SOAP server or client interface to your big in-house or vertical market Delphi application. SOAP based services are incredibly important.

However, a strange thing happened; The Web App Debugger (WAD) which was always the weirdest part of the WebServices architecture in Delphi, went away. That left you with WAD-based demos that didn't work any more, and CGI based demos that required either Apache or IIS with CGI support, to run Delphi apps through an external web server. Hardly an easy way to develop, prototype, or demo web-services. Then Delphi 2010 introduced (and XE and XE2 continue to have) the ability to have the SOAP Web Services new-application wizard make an INDY VCL server. That made the server application into a tiny normal VCL application. While that's still not the best way to deploy a large-scale production environment, it's pretty useful for debugging, and can also be a reasonable way to deploy certain very-lightweight (internal LAN, not internet-facing) SOAP server systems, for 1 to 100 concurrent connections, or so.

Anyways, the demos were just plain not anywhere to be found in Delphi XE, and are still gone from XE2. When I needed to make a SOAP server and client and make them talk, there wasn't a demo anywhere to be found that ran in Delphi XE. Now XE2 is the current version and the mess continues. I asked a question almost a year ago (June 2011) on stackoverflow, that got a lot of not-quite answers, and a few links to tutorials, but no code, and no demos.

So I fixed the demos, and I've posted them on CodeCentral. They're here (item 28789) on CodeCentral. I have tested all of them on Delphi XE, and tested most of them on XE2, and they all build on both, and run perfectly well on XE. If anybody finds any bugs in them, please email me (my email address is in the readme).

I intend to update that code-central article with new versions when needed, if new Delphi language changes make it possible. My next SOAP demo will be VisualStudio/WCF/C# interop demo between Delphi and C#/WCF. I would like to add a Java interop demo too. I'm awaiting word from Embarcadero if they'll allow me to turn this set of demos into an open-source project so that we can get Delphi+SOAP demo contributions from all over the place.

I hope you find them useful if you are interested in SOAP programming with Delphi XE, and are wondering where all the demos for SOAP applications programming went.