Interesting. That confirms the impression I have: many people have existing frameworks in place (such as EJBs that work with XML encoded as strings or custom code using DOM) and then later try to integrate that with a SOAP stack, but fail to do so in a correct way. As you say, they then choose what appears to be the "path of least resistance": since obviously any XML processing framework allows to serialize into a string and any SOAP stack supports strings, that's indeed the "easiest" solution.
Since this seems to be so common, maybe we should add mediators to Synapse that allow to turn these services into real Web services. Or maybe we already support this somehow? Andreas On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 19:04, Jaeger, Jay - DOT <[email protected]> wrote: > I can perhaps add some insight into this, since this thread caused us to have > some dicussions about it today with respect to web services we are involved > with being developed and/or enhanced by two vendors we are using. > > One is using SOAP the way you might expect: no embedded XML. > The other vendor is embedding XML in SOAP. With quoting. > > Why? As a guess, because the latter group had probably been doing POX (plain > old XML over HTTP) and wanted to be able to support SOAP with a minimum of > effort. And, since most SOAP implementations seem to be capable of > automatically providing the necessary quoting, it was acually the path of > least resistance. > > JRJ > > -----Original Message----- > From: Asankha Perera [mailto:[email protected]]on Behalf Of > Asankha C. Perera > Sent: Friday, February 13, 2009 3:49 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: Invoking Synapse from Non Axis 2 Client > > > Andreas Veithen wrote: >>> This is not good.. you should not be sending an XML payload in a SOAP >>> message as a String! and your payload even has the XML declaration! This is >>> very poor design and could cause many problems >>> >> >> I totally agree here. However I see (too) many people doing this. Any >> idea what makes people choose this approach? >> > I guess lots of people still use XML as strings, falsely thinking its > more optimal.. recently I helped a client who generated loads of XML > using String concatenation! And I have even seen some publicly available > web services that defines elements such as follows :-) > > <strProduct>xxx</strProduct> > <strSubProd>yyy</strSubProd> > <strService>zzz</strService> > <strSvcType /> > > -- > Asankha C. Perera > http://adroitlogic.org > > http://esbmagic.blogspot.com > >
