Axis (or any web services framework) is not an appropriate system to use if your goal is to send a Java *class* over the network. Axis communicates using SOAP. SOAP is an XML messaging protocol. Its purpose is to send XML messages (i.e., data) between two nodes. It does not send objects.
java2wsdl is a tool that examines the public interface of a Java class, and from that generates a WSDL description for the class. The WSDL description will contain an operation for each public method in the class, and it will generate an XML Schema definition of a set of data elements that correspond to the method parameters and return values. Any attributes or methods in the class that are not public will not be mapped to the WSDL.
Don't think of it as a "not nice, but workable" situation. If you want a distributed object system for transferring objects between two Java applications, use RMI or CORBA. The reason people use SOAP is so that they need to communicate with many different languages -- some of which aren't object-oriented (e.g., COBOL).
Anne
On 1/24/06, Bas A. Schulte <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi all,
I'm trying to send an existing java class (not my app, don't have the
source, beyond a decompiled version to see what's in it) over the
wire using Axis on both ends, with very little success.
What I'm wondering about: how does java2wsdl work in terms of
establishing what attributes a given class has? It appears to derive
this from the methods of the class, not by looking at the (private)
attributes, would that be how it works?
My problem is that the class has an array (boolean[]) for which there
is no getter/setter, hence it does not show up in the wsdl. It
doesn't get transferred over the wire and thus the instance on the
server end doesn't have this array set properly, causing some methods
to toss a null pointer exception :(
I'll have to solve it by creating a similar class, construct one in
the client and send that over the wire instead. Not nice, but workable.
Just can't seem to figure out how a) the wsdl gets created and b)
serialization takes place.
Cheers,
Bas.
