If you are developing Android applications that need to interface with SOAP web services, you probably know that the Android SDK does not have any support for this technology. It is somewhat considered legacy, but it is still widely used in many enterprise applications. When you look around for a SOAP library that is suitable for mobile devices in the sense that it is not too heavy you will inevitable find ksoap, which has a history on J2ME and Blackberry. Unfortunately the project has been pretty much dead for a long time now.
Luckily it was ported and adapted to Android and has been hosted on google code for a while. It works well enough, but at least the last couple of month the project was very quiet (=dead). Since I am using the library I have created a patch a while ago that fixes a problem with reading attributes and the article on my site got lots of readers. That also sparked patches being sent to me via email as well as on github. Since those patches looked good and I was going to do the work to use them anyway I decided to take over the dormant project on google code after multiple attempts to contact the previous owner in the last months. Within a day of launching the take over request I was the project owner and also got the okay from the previous project owner (thanks Karl and Google).
The next day I had a a bunch of patches applied to my github clone, that now acts as upstream as well as done a major cleanup of the wiki and issue tracker. I have also created a mailing list and hope that many of you will join me there.
Please understand that the project is basically in maintenance mode, so unless I find a problem that affects me I won’t be doing any active development. I am however more than willing to
- take patches from you
- answer questions where I can on the mailing list and stackoverflow
- update the wiki and issue tracker
- take new contributors for development, documentation and other tasks on board
- cut new releases
So with that said, and a thanks to the people who have already contributed, enjoy the new 2.5.1 release with a bunch of fixes (e.g. attribute support, soapfault support and a bunch of convenience methods). The project is to some extend its all yours now. Bring on the help!
PS: Anybody want to contribute some sort of logo image? E.g. a soap like looking Android with some xml tags on it or whatever?
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