<small> Please excuse if you receive this mail several times or contains information that is redundant to you. The following should actually be regarded as a pre-alpha announcement since <a href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">I</a>�m on holiday until the 4th of September such that you must rely on the sources and the yet limited documentation (unit test example+paper+javadocs) to experiment with ZOAP. This will soon change (beta-release, UML description, and standard SOAP examples are underway), so I like to encourage you to participate! </small> <h1>Alpha-Release of the Zero-Effort Object Access Package (ZOAP)</h1> <h3> From SOAP ... </h3> The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/">Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)</a> is a lightweight protocol for the exchange of information in a globally distributed and loosely coupled environment. The current <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/general/soapspec.asp">SOAPV1.1 specification</a>, inter alia authored by <a href="http://www.microsoft.com">Microsoft Corp.</a> and <a href="http://www.ibm.com">International Business Machines (IBM)</a>, has been recently submitted to and acknowledged by the <a href="http://www.w3c.org/">World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C)</a> (see <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2000/May00/SoapW3CPR.asp"> this press article</a>). <p> By embracing existing Internet technologies, SOAP has the potential to become a powerful and really interoperable standard for messaging middleware: The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210">eXtensible Markup Language (XML)</a> is chosen as a flexible and tolerant medium for encoding messages and their payload. For shipping such envelopes in a resource-saving and possibly asynchronous manner, a variety of bullet-proof and widely available transport protocols is applicable, such as the <a href="http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html">Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP1.1)</a> and the <a href="http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc821.html">Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)</a>.</font> </p> <h3> ... to ZOAP </h3> The <a href="http://www.jboss.org/zoap/zoap.htm">Zero-Effort Object Access Package (ZOAP)</a> is an Open Source SOAP implementation for the Java2 platform running under the <a href="license.html">GNU General Public License</a>. It aims to be a lightweight and modular alternative to the existing reference implementations. Furthermore, ZOAP is deeply integrated into the <a href="http://www.jboss.org/">jBoss application server</a> to transparently turn <a href="http://www.j2ee.com/">Enterprise Java-Beans (TM)</a> into globally interoperable web services. The source distribution is available via cvs under :pserver:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/products/cvs/ejboss/zoap <p> ZOAP has been initiated as a part of <a href="http://www.infor.de/">infor business solutions AG</a> application component platform. The current alpha is released in August 2000 and comes already with a decent set of <a href="#features">outstanding functionalities</a>. The <a href="#todo">short-term roadmap</a> ensures that ZOAP, in combination with the technologically advanced jBoss project, will develop into an up-front application middleware. A first beta release is planned for September/October 2000. </p> <h3> Contact </h3> For questions around ZOAP, please contact <a href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">Dr. Christoph G. Jung</a> or <a href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">Michael Wolber</a>. For questions around jBoss, please contact the <a href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">jBoss Organisation</a>. <h2> Features </h2> <ul> <li> 100% pure and lightweight Java implementation. </li> <li> On-the-fly (De-)Serialization (SAX, no intermediate DOM is generated). </li> <li> Extensible and expressive XML-Schema (draft as of May,2000) based Meta-Model Architecture; Supports Null-values and Polymorhpism. </li> <li> Powerful Builtin Encoding-Style Compliant to Java2 Serialization (Including Arbitrarily Nested Arrays and Collections). </li> <li> "Automatic-Mode" for Generating Deployment Meta-Data via Java Reflection. </li> <li> "Bootstrapping-Mode" for Reading Deployment Meta-Data. </li> <li> Service Contract Language is a Hybrid of the Microsoft Service Contract Language and XmlSchema. </li> <li> Builtin HTTP support (no servlet engine needed); Support for persistent HTTP/1.1 connections. </li> <li> Transparent Proxy Access </li> <li> Special Proxy Support for XML-enabled Web-Clients (no full (de-)serialisation needed). </li> <li> Ready-Made Container-Plugin for jBoss2.0. Supports Stateless Beans. </li> </ul> <h2> Roadmap </h2> <ul> <li> Filter Architecture to Configure Verbosity and Depth of the Serialisation Process </li> <li> Support for Stateful Beans through Persistent HTTP/1.1 connections. </li> <li> More Sophisticated (type-safe) Array and Collection Support: Lazy-Modes, Delta-Interpretation. </li> <li> Transactional and Asynchronous Messaging. </li> <li> Connection of the Filter Architecture to Security Roles. </li> <li> Support for Soap-Encoding-Style, XMI-Encoding-Style and Bean-Encoding-Style. </li> <li> Integration with Java Messaging Service and EJB2.0�s message-based beans. </li> <li> Enhanced Constraints and Validations as defined in XML-Schema. </li> <li> SMTP-support </li> </ul> <H2> Known Holes/Bugs </h2> <ul> <li> Binding.class indeed represents what is called an EncodingStyle in SOAP. Should be renamed. </li> <li> Lacking optmizing cache for Class-To-XmlType associations. </li> <li> Lacking In-VM optimization for SOAPInvocationHandler/SOAPTie/SOAPContainerInvoker. </li> <li> Not all license annotations in the src-files have yet been updated to GPL. </li> <li> minOccurs and maxOccurs of elements are not yet supported. (default: 0/unbounded) </li> <li> required of attributes is not yet supported. (default: false) </li> <li> SOAPContainerInvoker takes connection data out of ejb-jar.xml and jboss.xml, not the contract.scl.</li> </ul> <hr> <small> Last change of $RCSfile: index.html,v $ by $Author: jung $ on $Date: 2000/07/06 14:11:07 $; See source for logging information. <p> Copyright (c) 2000 <a href="http://www.infor.de">infor business solutions AG</a>, Hauerstrasse 12, D-66299 Friedrichsthal, Germany. All Rights Reserved. </p> <p> This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. </p> <p> This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. </p> <p> You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. </p> </small> Best, Dr. Christoph G. Jung Software Engineer infor: business solutions AG Vincenz-Prie�nitz-Stra�e 3 Hauerstra�e 12 D-76131 Karlsruhe, Germany D-66299 Friedrichsthal Fon +49(0)721.6634-0 +49(0)6897.9833-0 Fax +49(0)721.6634-200 +49(0)6897.9833-99 <http://www.infor.de> <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- -------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Problems?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
