On Monday, Google announced that they were effectively end-of-lifing their SOAP API, back-dated to 5. December. “Announce” isn’t quite the right word, but English doesn’t have a verb for “posted a notice on the API’s site without any heads-up to developers”.

Since several of our applications at work depend on that SOAP API, this threw a bit of a wrench into our day. As a work-around, I spent yesterday coding up a SOAP server that allows applications that use the Google API to continue working. The tool acts as a gateway, translating SOAP calls into requests to Google’s web interface, scraping the result pages and packaging the search results back up into SOAP. It supports all doGetCachedPage(), doSpellingSuggestion() and doGoogleSearch() calls, though search results lack some of the data that the SOAP API provided. I used Net::Google for testing the gateway, and as far as I can tell everything works fine.

Most of my development time was spent wrestling first with SOAP::Lite, trying to figure out exactly what incantations I needed to get a bare-bones SOAP server working, then with the perl regexes needed to scrape the result pages (grrr…special cases…grrr). In the end, we had a releasable product within 24 hours of reading about the discontinuation of the API, so I’m pretty happy with myself, especially since I’d never done server-side SOAP stuff before.

We’ve released the current 0.1 version of code, with plans for a faster 0.2 soon.