I agree about the difficulty in using basic OO concepts (namely, inheritance). Before XFire, I used Glue intermittently for 4 years and Axis for 2 years. We used Glue between a Java-based server app and a C#-based client app. We used inheritance all over the place, and we used rpc-encoded style, and we had absolutely no problems (but Glue has proven to be comparatively slow, and it appears to be somewhat dead based on the amount of attention it gets on webMethods' website). Because interoperability was easy using Glue, I was surprised to later read that document/literal style is superior for interoperability.
I think we've danced around this question on this list, or maybe it's been answered - is it possible for document/literal style web services to properly support inheritance, and if so, can XFire do that without having to put forth the effort of supporting rpc/encoded as well? One easy time I've had using web services is when we had to invoke a set of web services published by another entity, and those folks decided to return all data in XML documents (often large, like 15+ mb) as SOAP attachments. They had a UDDI-like website that defined all of their web services and what XSD each web service operation used to return data. It proved to be very easy to take the XSD and run a tool like Castor to generate Java classes to suck up the XML. The XSDs had all kinds of inheritance relationships in them, but there was no issue with only having a superclass defined as a return type or parameter type in the WSDL because nothing was really defined in the WSDL - the returned data types were all in the XSD. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this in all situations, but it was easy to use in that one situation. Rob ---- On Fri, 28 Apr 2006, Vinicius Carvalho ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > Hello there! Just jumping off the XFire discussion a bit (cuz after all > XFire is about WS right ;) ) > Well, as stated at : > http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=40064 > I've just passed for all those stages, I've been working with WS for over 2 > years now (before that, only simple tests). One thing that really frustrates > me is the whole idea (miss understanding behind WS and Objects). > Well, like it or not, we are in a OO world, and we always try to expose our > services in a OO way, which lead us to all sort of problems. One thing we do > is the use of the Transfer Object (Value Object if you will). Basically we > do all the crap (sorry for the bad word) we did past on the Entity days, and > expose a simpler, shallow object (no deep graph object) to the world. In my > opinion, that sucks (ooops I did it again)! I've read quite some blogs, > articles and forums, but it seems that no one has a real solution (if > there's one) for this. Well if you guys that are on the front every day > don't mind sharing some experience I think it would be very interesting. > > Best Regards >
