Imagine, or recall, a scenario. You integrate three applications, two client HTTP ones and the third is a backend one (no matter the technology) […]

It was always possible to use GUI, API or a service to ping an outgoing HTTP/SOAP connection - the idea behind it is that you pretty much always want to check whether it is your servers that can connect to remote services not that you can access remote resources from your local host as it doesn’t tell you, for instance, if firewalls between the servers and outside world are configured properly.

Did you know that you could invoke any service from command line? This works with both Zato’s own API and the services you develop. Depending on how a service is implemented/what it’s exposed through, it can be done with JSON, plain XML, SOAP or any other data format a service accepts.

The post introduces Zato, an open-source integration platform in Python, and shows you how to integrate Django, or indeed any piece of Python software, with Zato and external web services using nothing but plain Python objects.