My ideal world would be for me to have a class that I can drop into some sort of container where I don't have to know anything about WSDL or deployment descriptors and security. That should be the containers work to figure it all out. I will wait patiently until that day.
When developing a project that will be exposed as a web service you really need to decide what the intended target is. If it's a large server side api that will be used by multiple clients which for the most part aren't going to be using it as a web service, start with your code then generate a WSDL. If you are creating something that is going to be predominantly going to be used behind a web service, I would start with a WSDL.
Also, I'm coming to the realization that nobody should have to deal with a WSDL. I like the idea of a XML Schema team, a group of of senior developers/architects who define what/why/how things are exposed.
Joe
Anne Thomas Manes wrote:
In a better world, you have a XML Schema administration team (similar to your DBA team) that is responsible for developing the schemas that applications will communicate with. (Do your developers define their own database schemas???)
When developers build services, they should be handed the schemas they are supposed to use, and then map those schems to their code.
Developers should not generate WSDL from code.
Anne
On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 14:55:38 -0800, Tim K. (Gmane) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
In an ideal world I would agree with Anne. However, consider this scenario: you have a team of 10+ developers working on a server side API that follows the rules to allow it to be easily exposed as web services. The API has over 200+ methods total, distributed over 20+ modules. Each module would be exposed as a web service, hence 20+ WSDL files. The goal is to have the API on the server side look exactly the same as the API on the client side, so in theory an application built against the API could be run in process on the server or remotely via web services.
Now, only a couple of these developers know anything about web services and even those developers are just getting their feet wet with web services.
During the development cycle the API's can (slightly) change many times a day and everything needs to be recompiled/regenerated. I think it's unreasonable in this case to edit any generated WSDL files by hand. It's much more reasonable to just fire an ant task that starts with the server side java classes, generates the WSDL's and from those the client side stubs. This improves the development process a lot.
I hope I'll live to see the day when the tools are good enough to achieve this task end to end. Obviously we are not there yet, but we are getting close.
Btw, this is not an imaginary scenario, it's the cruel reality I live in every day.
Tim
Anne Thomas Manes wrote:
I strongly disagree with Sunil. WSDL First (TM) is the way to go.
I think it's okay to use java2wsdl to generate a WSDL template to start with, but you should always edit the generated WSDL.
My recommendation is to use a WSDL editing wizard. Cape Clear provides a free one (SOA Editor). Altova and Sonic provide commercial ones.
Anne
On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 13:49:53 -0500, Soti, Dheeraj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Sunil,
Will java2wsdl create the complex type hierarchies correctly? I have a complex class hierarchy (using inheritance and nested classes) and finally I ended up handcoding the wsdl from scratch. Did I miss something? I've also read some best practice articles talking about top down approach where u write your wsdl first and then proceed.
Thanks
Dheeraj
-----Original Message----- From: Sunil Kothari [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2005 1:20 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re:possible ways of creating WSDL file
I think of 3 ways of creating WSDL 1) Using java2wsdl tool 2) Using .jws facility 3) Handcode WSDL
I think 3) is error-prone and requires high level of understanding of WSDL. 2) is also not recommended for various reasons like a) No deployment descriptors are created b) WSDL is not persistent and prone to changes c) (This I am not sure) For overloaded methods this way of creation causes problems.
I hope this helps.
Sunil Kothari Valtech India
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