Install gsoap with Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, zypper

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• soapcpp2
• wsdl2h

Project history

Genivia's resource page says gSOAP was first introduced in 1999 as a research project at Florida State University. The original idea was generic XML communication through type-safe data binding between XML schema types and C/C++ data types, using a domain-specific C compiler to generate conversion code.

The toolkit then grew to support SOAP web-services messaging, giving rise to the name gSOAP, for generic XML and SOAP. Genivia says further development under Genivia Incorporated added WSDL and XML Schema processing in 2003, WS-* protocol capabilities, XML-RPC messaging, JSON, a stand-alone web server, and other features.

The public changelog begins with version 1.1 on 2000-01-01, adding typedef conventions, enumerations, binary encodings, pass-by-reference output parameters, and class method specification. Version 1.2 in 2001 added a WSDL generator, and the 2001 line also added a Win32 port and HTTP/1.1 chunked-transfer support.

Genivia's product page frames gSOAP as a dual-licensed product family: a GPLv2 open-source edition for GPL-compatible projects and commercial EULA editions for proprietary products. That licensing split is central to how the software has been packaged and adopted.

Adoption history

gSOAP adoption followed enterprise and embedded C/C++ web-service needs. Genivia says the software has driven systems for more than two decades in industries including financial, telecom, health, automotive, defense, energy, and publishing.

The product page lists a broad customer snapshot, including technology, telecom, finance, industrial, medical, defense, and public-sector organizations. Even without treating that list as endorsements, it shows the project's target market: organizations with C/C++ codebases that needed SOAP/XML interoperability.

The toolkit also became part of package-manager culture because it installs real developer tools rather than only a library. Packagers expose wsdl2h and soapcpp2 so developers can generate sources during builds or development workflows.

How it is used

A common gSOAP flow starts with wsdl2h, which converts WSDL or XML Schema into C/C++ declarations, followed by soapcpp2, which generates serializers, client proxies, server skeletons, namespace maps, and WSDL output from an interface header.

The user guide shows the reverse direction as well: developers can define a C or C++ service interface header, run soapcpp2, compile the generated server code with libgsoap or stdsoap2 sources, and deploy through CGI, FastCGI, a stand-alone HTTP server, Apache, or IIS modules.

Why package nerds care

gSOAP is package-nerd significant because it is one of those tools that turns network protocol schemas into source code during a build. Its package has to ship code generators, import files, runtime libraries, samples, and documentation in a way that works for C and C++ projects.

It also represents the long tail of SOAP/XML infrastructure. Even as many new APIs moved to JSON/REST styles, gSOAP stayed relevant where standards such as WSDL, WS-Security, WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, ONVIF, HL7, FHIR, ISO 20022, SWIFT, XBRL, and enterprise service stacks remain important.

Timeline

• 1999: Introduced as a Florida State University research project for generic XML communication and type-safe C/C++ data binding.
• 2000: Version 1.1 appeared in the public changelog.
• 2001: Version 1.2 added a WSDL generator, followed by a Win32 port in 1.2w.
• 2003: Genivia describes new WSDL and XML Schema processing capabilities under its development.
• 2008: Genivia and collaborators published a journal article describing a framework for service-oriented computing with C and C++ web-service components.
• 2020s: Genivia describes the toolkit as a mature source base maintained since 2001 and used across many industry sectors.

Related projects

• WSDL, XML Schema, SOAP, WS-Security, WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, XML-RPC, JSON, Apache, IIS, cURL, and WinInet are all named by Genivia as standards or integration targets around gSOAP.
• RE/flex and ugrep are other Genivia projects, but gSOAP's closest technical relatives are SOAP stacks and XML data-binding tools for other languages.

Sources

• https://www.genivia.com/changelog.html
• https://www.genivia.com/dev.html
• https://www.genivia.com/doc/guide/html/index.html
• https://www.genivia.com/products.html
• https://www.genivia.com/resources.html