While I was working on this stuff, I noticed the org.apache.axis.encoding.Deserializer interface had been introduced, I assume as another point of extensibility(?), during Rich's revamp of the encoding framework. I have removed this interface, and renamed the DeserializerImpl class to Deserializer, as it was before. The reason for this is as follows: before Rich's modification, Deserializer extended SOAPHandler directly, so it was clear that all Deserializers WERE in fact SOAPHandlers. Afterwards, there were a number of places where we needed to do a manual cast of a Deserializer to a SOAPHandler deep in the deserialization code. This worked, because every Deserializer implementation we currently had extended SOAPHandler (b/c DeserializerImpl did). However, there is no requirement that someone wouldn't try to build another Deserializer implementation which didn't extend SOAPHandler, and break the system. These kinds of cross-casts are really bad ideas. The code is now less prone to breakage, and easier to understand.
Note that we DO still implement the JAX-RPC Deserializer interface, which is the one that really needs to be an interface. --Glen
