Proposal for web service proxy transformer

[Warrell]

Hi All,   Does the community agree that a new Cocoon SOAP proxy transformer could better support the increasing demand for SOA applications realised through SOAP Web services?   I ask this because having used the WSProxyGenerator for a REST web service http://www.nhs.uk/WebServices/ExportLocalServicesData/LocalServices.asmx?op=GetByOrganisationAddress (worked very well) I found that there was no support for a SOAPAction. I modified the WSProxyGenerator to HTTPPost a SOAPAction and use the HTTPRequest InputStream as the SOAP Message. However this meant that I could not do anything to the SOAP Message before it got to Cocoon. The StreamGenerator was the obvious choice to take the SOAP message and put it into the pipeline but I could not see a way to use the two generators in series. To overcome this I hacked together a CustomDOMTransformer and this has proved useful for me and at least one other Cocoon user.  I have looked around and see that some people use XSP to do something similar. Also Antonio Gallardo has created http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COCOON-1618 to do something similar for the Axis block. Please let me know gently if I have missed something else obvious.   I get the impression that XSP is being (or should be) deprecated. Although many people are, I was never personally fond of JSP/ASP and similarly I worry that Axis is doing more to obfuscate Web Services than make them easy to implement. As we all know this is a great opportunity for Cocoon to spread its reach. More components and samples that make this simple to understand and easy to do must be a good thing. I have put my very simple implementation at http://www.warrell.co.uk/cocoon/proxy.zip   With your approval and help I would like to move this forward and maybe get it into the 2.2 release.   Thank you for Cocoon,   Best regards,   Warrell