Hi All,
Hope all is well.
Over the past couple of days I've been working on adding the
ability for a Cocoon application to serve SOAP requests.
The motivation for this work came from:
o The need to share business logic data with other projects, ie.
B2B communcation.
o The desire to build an administration application and remotely query
a live system about its status.
Instead of building a second server into our application (ie. RMI,
CORBA, etc), I thought it might be better to use SOAP for this for
several reasons, mainly since servlet based Cocoon applications are
really HTTP oriented servers anyway.
The code adding this functionality is in bugzilla, #11728.
My hope is that this feature is of use for others too.
Essentially, I took the RPCRouterServlet from the Apache SOAP
project and ported it to Cocoon as a Reader, which in effect
allows you to register SOAP services within your Cocoon app, and
serve data to other clients.
The reader can be configured in the sitemap as follows:
<!-- Defines a SOAP RPC reader that will serve SOAP requests via HTTP-POST.
'managed-services' defines a list of Apache SOAP deployment descriptors
that will be automatically deployed at startup and undeployed at
shutdown of this reader.
-->
<map:reader logger="sitemap.reader.soap-rpc" name="soap-rpc"
src="org.apache.cocoon.reading.SoapRPCReader">
<managed-services>
<descriptor
src="resource://org/apache/cocoon/components/soap/services/memory/DeploymentDescriptor.xml"/>
</managed-services>
</map:reader>
Consult the javadocs for the full option set which includes the
ability to set an EnvelopeEditorFactory, and custom SOAP server xml
config file.
The pipeline match is quite simple like most readers:
<!-- Match SOAP RPC Router requests -->
<map:match pattern="rpcrouter">
<map:read type="soap-rpc" mime-type="text/xml"/>
</map:match>
With these 2 sections added to your sitemap, you can then make
HTTP-POST queries to the above pipeline to deploy, list, invoke or
undeploy particular SOAP services from your Cocoon app. The
ServiceManagerClient class that comes with Apache SOAP is quite
useful for this.
I've included an example service with my patch which allows a
remote client to query the amount of free & total memory the remote
Cocoon app currently has, and also allows a client to invoke the
garbage collector on the remote application.
For those interested have a look at the class and deployment
descriptor in the o/a/c/components/soap/services/memory directory,
and the webapps/samples/soap directory.
The SoapRPCReader also adds the Cocoon request, response, context
and ComponentManager to the SOAP request context, which means it's
possible for your SOAP services to access any avalon components you may
have written, and also session data that may be relevant for the
particular request. Have a look at the
o/a/c/components/soap/services/template directory for an example of
this.
Normal SOAP services (ie. cocoon independant) can also be deployed,
including those implemented in other languages via BSF support. The
Apache SOAP documentation describes how this can be done.
The reader itself requires the presence of the Apache SOAP jar
(2.3.1 used during development), and the SUN activation and
javamail jar. I've modified the build.xml so that the reader and
associated services are only built if these libraries are present.
I'm now looking at the various statistical & administration
information we might like to provide from Cocoon, hopefully in
combination with the instrumentation interfaces from Excalibur.
Ok, so I hope its of use for more people that just me, if there's any
questions, comments, feel free to ask.
Cheers,
Marcus
--
.....
,,$$$$$$$$$, Marcus Crafter
;$' '$$$$: Computer Systems Engineer
$: $$$$: ManageSoft GmbH
$ o_)$$$: 82-84 Mainzer Landstrasse
;$, _/\ &&:' 60327 Frankfurt Germany
' /( &&&
\_&&&&'
&&&&.
&&&&&&&:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
