Hi Morley,
I answer at Cocoon-dev as others might be interested.
AFAIK there are no "current prefered method" for calling web-services. I and my colleagues, use the extended SourceWritingTransformer (SWT) and org.apache.excalibur.source.impl.HTTPClientSource that you can find in http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24402, (I updated it with new patches for the SWT and HTTPClientSource, you still need some stuff from the earlier patch, though). It should be possible to use with HTTPS if you connect https to o.a.e.source.impl.HTTPClientSourceFactory in cocoon.xconf, but I have not tested it.
In some applications we have used the HTTPClientSource from flowscript code instead of calling it from the SWT, it requires some more work but gives better control of error handling (and also memory consumption for very large soap requests).
My idea with extending the HTTPClientSource with SOAP (post) functionallity was to gather all uses of the o.a.jakarta.commons.HTTPClient in one component. Now similar things are done in various SOAP and Web-proxy components. From a technical POV I still think it is a good idea. There where however a number of other problems that have done that I not have put the code in the Cocoon CVS yet: I never succeeded in updating the avalon CVS, Excalibur have sometimes been quite hard to compile, there where talk about deprecating the Excalibur components, there where severe community problems in Avalon, it have been moved from Ant to Maven and from CVS to Subversion.
Now, Excalibur has left Avalon and started a new top level project that seem to be healthy, so I'll try to integrate the extended SWT and HTTPClientSource as soon as I find some time for it ;)
I spent some time today trying to test the code with the samples that I submitted in the bugzilla entry, but the web services that I call from xmethods.net seemed to be down or at least very slow, anyone knowing about any other good webservice test sites, preferably with WSDL descriptions?
/Daniel
Morley Howell wrote:
Daniel,
I've been struggling for a few days to call a Web service from Cocoon 2.1.5, with little joy.
I noticed various discussions on the wiki and the dev list about your source writing idea and some other options from Daniel Fagerstrom and Steve Punte. Do you know what the current preferred method is to call a Web service from Cocoon? Are any of them integrated into 2.1.5? Do any of them work over HTTPS (unlike the SOAP XSP logicsheet).
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Morley Howell
