\chapter{Introduction}

\ZSI{}, the Zolera SOAP Infrastructure, is a Python package that
provides an implementation of the SOAP specification, as described in
\citetitle[http://www.w3.org/TR/soap]{The SOAP 1.1 Specification}.
This guide demonstrates \ZSI{}'s typecode generation facilities, these
typecodes are then used to parse and generates SOAP messages, and
converts between native Python datatypes and SOAP syntax.

\module{ZSI} requires Python 2.3 or later and PyXML version 0.8.3 or later.

The \module{ZSI} project is maintained at SourceForge, at
\url{http://pywebsvcs.sf.net}.
\ZSI{} is discussed on the Python web services mailing list, visit
\url{http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pywebsvcs-talk}
to subscribe.

For a low-level treatment of typecodes, and a description of SOAP-based 
processing see the ZSI manual.

Within this document, \code{tns} is used as the prefix for the
application's target namespace, and the term
\emph{element} refers to a DOM element node.)

\section{How to Read this Document}


