On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Benson Margulies <[email protected]> wrote:
> The two CXF things I mentioned ... front end and data binding ... are
> neither of them 1-1 with the WSDL binding concept you reference. In my
> time on the project, I can't remember anyone come through here looking
> to deal with an 'exotic' binding at this level.
That certainly supports the results of my research to date, although
I'm genuinely surprised that such 'exotic' services have not been
described in WSDL (with extensions where necessary) more often. After
all, I thought that WSDL had been designed to do just that (in a
standard, machine-readable way too)!
For example, suppose there is a web service that requires the serial
form of its many and complex XML messages to be XOR'd with a one time
pad prior to transmission as the content of an HTTP POST request or
response; many different parties might provide this same service.
Since the port type being so secured could be deeply complex, it would
be very useful (and ought to be trivial) to describe the service in
WSDL along the following lines:
<wsdl:binding name="PerfectlySecretHTTP" type="complexPortType">
<otp:pad codebook="bookIdentifier" wsdl:required="true"/>
<http:binding verb="POST"/>
...
</wsdl:binding>
Naturally, the complexity comes in implementing providers and
consumers of such a service. If I've understood you correctly, it
appears that the popular approach is to drop the WSDL altogether
(despite the tremendous advantages it could provide higher up the
stack) solely in order to implement a relatively small change to the
wire format?
> So, while on the one hand, soap bindings are just another class
> hierarchy in CXF, I don't feel at all confident in asserting that you
> can just knock off a new one and expect it to work. If things work as
> usual around here, presently Dan will turn up in this conversation, so
> I'll stop here before I write anything completely out to lunch.
What makes this even more remarkable is that WSIF enabled fairly easy
development of custom "providers" for WSDL binding extensions (see
<http://ws.apache.org/wsif/developers/how_to_provider.html>) almost a
decade ago. Surely functionality of this sort has made it to CXF?
Or, quite possibly, I've overlooked something fairly basic?
-- Alan
