Thursday, September 23, 2004

Supporting both pure REST based XML services and SOAP based web services with ActiveSOAP One of the interesting things thats happened lately with ActiveSOAP is that it can easily support both pure REST services (sending XML over HTTP or JMS) as well as full SOAP 1.2 web services. Indeed the same endpoint instance can expose a service over pure REST and one or more SOAP protocol versions over HTTP and/or JMS. This allows lightweight some clients to use pure REST and then when the use of the SOAP protocol (and other optional WS-protocols) makes sense, to support those too all in the same endpoint. This is useful as you should only pay for what you need; for many use cases pure REST is fine - its often up to the endpoint to decide whether or not the SOAP protocol is worth the cost and if it is which version of SOAP it wishes to support along with what of the WS-protocols it requires too. Other than the low level handlers for StAX, SAX and TrAX, the first data binding tool supported is XMLBeans. We've a simple example in CVS which demonstrates exposing a POJO which uses XMLBeans generated from a WSDL as a SOAP endpoint. Its pretty clean and lightweight, with few jar dependencies so easy to embed. Example First you need some kinda service to expose. So we wrote a little interface. public interface SnowboardService { /** * An example service method which accepts an * XMLBean document and so will be auto exposed */ public XmlObject invoke(GetEndorsingBoarderDocument request); } There's a method on this interface which accepts an XMLBeans type. We can have as many methods as we like all auto-published, the only requirement is that the parameter must be an XMLBeans type, so that when we register it with XMLBeansRegistry it can auto-deduce the QName which matches the XMLBean type. Then if we register an implementation of this interface with the XMLBeansRegistry we can automatically publish the service as both REST and SOAP endpoints[sigma] XMLBeansRegistry registry = new XMLBeansRegistry(); registry.registerService(SnowboardServiceImpl.class); Reader in = createReader("sampleRequest.xml"); StringWriter out = new StringWriter(); SoapService service = new SoapService(registry); service.invoke(in, out); 7:54:05 PM    comment []