[OpenLayers-Users] Custom proxy/facade between OpenLayers client and a SOAP Web Service

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 08:37:31AM +0000, Ian Feeney wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Fairly new to open Layers, and looking for some advice and hopefully pointed in the right direction.
> 
> Looking to develop web mapping for internet clients using OpenLayers.  Mapping will come from a SOAP web service (NOT WMS) behind a firewall.  For security reasons we don't want to make this SOAP service available on the internet, and have the idea that we could develop a sort of proxy, or facade that will sit between OpenLayers in the client browsers, and the SOAP service to handle image requests.  The idea is that we then only need to allow access to the SOAP ws from the proxy.  This will proxy will probably be a php componenet in an existing php site.  The url property of the OpenLayers.Layer will point to this proxy, and the proxy will simply pull out parameters from the request such as BBOX, layers, and present them to the SOAP ws.  A base64 image string will come back from the ws, and the image will be returned to the client.
> 
> So, does this sound like a goer?  

Yes.

> What do I need to think about?  What OpenLayers.Layer type should I use? 

No reason, in my mind not to just make the proxy look "WMS-like";
take ?BBOX= from the URL, and use that to form your proxy request. So long
as your service just ignores extra parameters, you'll end up using the most 
commonly used OL layer class and won't have to write much fancy code.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta