Dennis Sosnoski wrote:Hi Alek,
Long term it's clear that real data binding support needs to be integrated into the SOAP framework....
do you know if anybody tried to add support for XmlBeans (http://xml.apache.org/xmlbeans/) to AXIS?
we have XmlBeans integrated in WS/XSUL (aka XSOAP4) which is document style based in its core so it needs some kind of data binding. XmlBeans works very well in this capacity as it has a very extensive support for XML Schemas (AFAIK there is nothing open source that has better support ...).
This is great to hear about, but information on WS/XSUL looks scarce (I found your slide set - or is that slajd set?). Can you point me at anything that's usable? I'd love to include WS/XSUL in a round of doc/lit performance tests I'm running.
I thought from the beginning that XMLBeans would be a great basis for a WS implementation, and told the BEA people that I hoped they were working on integrating it. Something like this is probably what's needed for the next generation of Apache SOAP. The only problem I see with an XMLBeans approach is that you're once again tying your application code directly to the wire format of the SOAP messages - I think they should often be decoupled. On the other hand, that way the schema really is the definitive reference - if you change the schema you have to rebuild your derived classes and modify your application code to match.
I've got my own lightweight SOAP framework built around JiBX. I'll try to get something out about that, probably adding it as a subproject in conjunction with the beta 3a release next week, so that people who are interested in a decoupled approach will have something to try.
- Dennis
