Wednesday, December 03, 2003

TopLink Web Services - Oxymoron? Everytime I work with OracleAS TopLink I am surprised at the depth and breadth it brings to solving object-relational mapping - both design time and runtime.  Persistence in J2EE always seems to bring up religious debates over CMP entity EJB persistence versus POJO persistence - what's nice about TopLink is that it doesn't particularly care what your poison is - CMP, BMP, POJO etc.  Choose and then TopLink gives you some help to get the job done. None of that sounds like Web services yet surprisingly all that mapping infrastructure has direct applicability to Web services.  In the TopLink 10.0.3 Developer Preview, TopLink is well underway to providing a very cool solution to the XML<->object mapping problem. The most interesting example in the TopLink 10.0.3 Preview, from my one track Web services view of the world, is the one showing how to use TopLink as a custom serialization mechanism for SOAP messages. Often folks want to be able to take arbitrarily complex SOAP message bodies and map them to a Java object model - this example shows how you do this with TopLink. TopLink pioneered the problem space for SQL->Java and Java->SQL mapping.  Now the move is happening for the XML->Java and Java->XML problem domain.  Obviously this problem is also being tackled through numerous standards, particularly JAXB - so TopLink, rather than re-inventing the wheel uses it under the covers and adds value to it.    One of the issues folks often have with XML<->Java solutions is performance ...  it will be interesting to watch how TopLink solves this issue.   See these release notes for more details ... wow! comment [] 9:58:38 AM