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Web Services Support in Mac OS X (10.1 or later)

SOAP 1.1 and XML-RPC support are provided in Mac OS X (10.1) via Apple events––the same Apple events that you can use, for example, to script the Finder. Both XML-RPC and SOAP 1.1 are, in effect, “baked into” the Apple Event Manager. Because this support is right there in the Event Manager, you also get AppleScript support “for free.”

This is a very popular high-level way for developers on the Macintosh platform to access corporate and public Web services. One distinct advantage is that you don’t have to go on the Internet and download a toolkit and then make sure that your customers have it.

An Apple event is an interprocess communication method. The support for Web services works by “hijacking” an addressing mode––typeApplicationURL––for an Apple event. In Mac OS X (10.1 or later), using a remote Apple event you can send a binary method to another application on another Mac OS X computer, and for addressing modes which are HTTP, these methods are treated as a Web service.

This is accomplished without any API changes to the Apple Event Manager, and just by enabling some additional data types that are hinted to the Apple Event Manager that the method to be called would use the specified SOAP framework.

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