Hi brian - if i remember correctly, the scenario that led you to create a provider was to format the SOAP body in a specific fashion. IMHO, if everyone agreed to doc/literal conventions and WS-I guidelines, you wouldn't have to perform such tricks.
Handlers are used for processing of SOAP headers. For example, to process infrastructure related directives related to security, reliability, and transactions. An analogy, concepts handled by the J2EE container would be formatted as SOAP headers. Handlers may rely in the serialization framework to convert XML objects into native Java objects. The serialization framework is used to convert to/from XML and Java. The framework currently has to support SOAP Section 5 encoding as well as literal encoding of SOAP elements. Additionally, in the web services platform, Axis code, there is a need to be able to map WSDL descriptions of service operations and messages to actual Java objects.. all in all.... pretty complicated interactions at times...... hope this helps, /Chris http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=37968 http://cvs.apache.org/~haddadc On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, Brian Abbott wrote: > Hi, > > > > I was wondering if anyone could give me a good overview of when > to use a serializer vs a handler vs a provider. I had a very specific > sequence of XML that I needed placed in a RPC response and ultimately ended > up writing a provider for it. By the way, I noticed a while back that > someone had mentioned registering a provider in a file > (org.apache.axis.deployment.wsdd.Provider) however, I think a better way is > to call WSDDProvider.registerProvider(QName, WSDDProvider). Anyway, this had > me thinking, it's not very clear when the appropriate time to use a > serializer or a handler or a provider is. Does anyone have any good > information on this? > > > > Thanks > > > > Brian Abbott > >
