Using SOAP to clean up configuration management

Abstract

Software products have become increasingly complicated over the past decade. For example, software is no longer restricted to a single binary file constructed from a small number of source files residing at a single location. Products today are frequently split across client and server architectures with further complications arising through the need for the client and the server to be built and run on different platforms, developed and deployed in multiple physical locations and by workers spanning several different time zones. These factors contribute to making modern software configuration management (CM) a vital but extremely complex process. In this paper we describe a new method for managing the configuration management of evolving modern day distributed systems based on the use of emerging web technologies, specifically XML (Extended Markup Language) XML-RPC (XML-Remote Procedure Call) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).