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Introduction to the SOAP API
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is an XML-based protocol which has an highly structured format.
It consists of three parts:
- an envelope, which defines the message structure and how to process it
- a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined datatypes
- a convention for representing procedure calls and responses
With this API format, all methods and properties are described by an XML document, the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
SOAP evolved as a successor of XML-RPC where you use methods remotely in scripts of few lines only. However the implementation of the protocol is a bit complex and you will need to use existing SOAP librairies in your favorite language.
Thanks to this API, you can buy and configure Netim products without needing to connect to the web interface.
How to get access to the API?
To use SOAP API, you must have a reseller account.
- If you are an existing customer, contact the sales team in order to learn more about the reseller program and upgrade your account.
- If you are new and want to become one of our resellers, you need to sign up for a reseller account. Feel free to contact our sales team at a first step to discuss your needs.
It is recommended that you use the operational testing environment (OTE) to integrate the API. Our OTE is an exact replica of our systems for development purpose.
Which languages the API is compatible with?
Any programming language that supports the SOAP protocol could be used.
This API is mainly used everyday with PHP which is easily supported:
- PHP: PHP SOAP Extension
Other languages could be used however we don’t guarantee that the WSDL will be fully supported. SOAP is a bit old and, nowadays, some customers encounter some issues when generating the classes from the WSDL. In such case, we encourage to use the REST API instead.
- Perl: SOAP::Lite
- Python: Zeep
- C#: .Net Framework
- Ruby: SOAP::WSDLDriver
- Java: JAX-WS
How to start?
- You can work first on our Operational Testing Environment in order to develop your scripts in a sandbox
- Look at the API clients we make available for the major languages
- Learn more about our system and processes
- Discover our use cases to get the basic steps for registering domains, and so on.
- Browse the API specifications to manage domain names, SSL certificates and web hosting services.