How can I consume a WSDL (SOAP) web service in Python?

Right now (as of 2008), all the SOAP libraries available for Python suck. I recommend avoiding SOAP if possible. The last time we where forced to use a SOAP web service from Python, we wrote a wrapper in C# that handled the SOAP on one side and spoke COM out the other.

I periodically search for a satisfactory answer to this, but no luck so far. I use soapUI + requests + manual labour.

I gave up and used Java the last time I needed to do this, and simply gave up a few times the last time I wanted to do this, but it wasn't essential.

Having successfully used the requests library last year with Project Place's RESTful API, it occurred to me that maybe I could just hand-roll the SOAP requests I want to send in a similar way.

Turns out that's not too difficult, but it is time consuming and prone to error, especially if fields are inconsistently named (the one I'm currently working on today has 'jobId', JobId' and 'JobID'. I use soapUI to load the WSDL to make it easier to extract endpoints etc and perform some manual testing. So far I've been lucky not to have been affected by changes to any WSDL that I'm using.

It's not true SOAPpy does not work with Python 2.5 - it works, although it's very simple and really, really basic. If you want to talk to any more complicated webservice, ZSI is your only friend.

The really useful demo I found is at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/webservices/tutorials/python - this really helped me to understand how ZSI works.

If you're rolling your own I'd highly recommend looking at http://effbot.org/zone/element-soap.htm.