The article that you mention uses the axis "wrapped" programming style with the Axis CVS version which supports castor serialization. They are using document/literal web services. Keep in mind that "message", "document", and "wrapped" are program styles not communication styles or WSLD styles. Although its a bit confusing because there is a "document" wsdl style and an axis "document" programming style. These two styles do not refer to the same thing. These programming styles are different ways the Axis soap engine handles the SOAP message once it is received.
I think the key thing is to understand the SAAJ/JAX-RPC specs well enough so you can evaluate a tool like Axis and another tool (perhaps suns JWSDP reference implementation) and see how each tool implements the specs and what kind of issues you would have if you changed your web service implementation from one tool to the other tool. IMHO this is a good architecture goal but with the current state of Java web services this should just be something that you know about and keep in mind but dont get to hung up about at the moment due to the level of maturity of the specs and the lack of implementations of those specs at this time. We picked Axis as our soap engine and we do not plan on switching to another one but we also keep the SAAJ/JAX-RPC specs in mind so we know what to look at if we would evaluate another soap engine. -----Original Message----- From: Thompson, Eugene [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 9:30 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: How to define document/literal service with multiple operations <see below> > One of the reasons standards exist is to avoid vendor lock-in. > It is a good architecture goal to avoid vendor lock-in and > write code to > the specs/standard apis. Absolutely. For the implementation, I would agree whole-heartedly. I guess where I'm missing the point is where you say ... > Wouldnt it be nice to be able to switch to Axis > without a huge amount of work (ie without changing a lot of your code) > because both the original SOAP engine you were using and Axis > implement > the SAAJ/JAX-RPC specs. Is it that Axis provides a communication style (message) that isn't part of the specs? If that's the case, then that is definitely an issue. I think my confusion is being compounded by an article I just read (http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-castor/) that very strongly promotes this exact style. In fact, I was going to recommend it as a solution to the original question, but after reading the follow-up posts, I saw that that solution was being specifically discarded. Is it a non-standard solution? Are there interop issues with it? Or is it just the "axis" way of doing things and if one where to change to another implementation, they would need to rebuild based on that implementation's preferred methodology? Can you tell I like to ask questions? heh > It doesnt seem to me that web services are quite at this level of > maturity but that should be the goal. And a good one at that! Thanks, Gene
