This discussion has been very useful. Thank you! Jim Murphy of MindReef/SOAPScope said:What that means to me is that SOAP is the ... tags that allow service designers to put application stuff in one bucket (soap:Body) and keep that separate from non-functional stuff that goes in Headers.
I agreed. But while I like the idea of SOAP headers, I don't have anything standard to put in them. Web services security is a debacle; there's still no standard tag for me to put authentication tokens in a SOAP header. And cleverer stuff like WS-Routing hasn't gone anywhere.
That commentary may be a little early - but accurate. :) Certainly with MSFT's Indigo and to some extent WSE 2.0 there is lots of support for standard headers. This is not a case that MSFT is out innovating the rest - IBM, BEA and others have/will have very powerful stacks too. IMHO, we are in an awkward transition time.
I guess in theory XML Schema is enough for the clients to do the magic parsing, but in practice it doesn't seem to work so well. I love this clarification to WS-I BP1.0a: http://www.ws-i.org/Profiles/Basic/2003-08/BasicProfile-1.0-errata-1.htm
R2110, R2111, R2112, and R2113 restricts array descriptions. This is
confusing and untestable as the concept of "array" is alien to XML
Schema
So, um, if XML Schema doesn't have arrays, how am I supposed to pass an array in a document/literal service?
That may be a bit of a mis-read i think. They are not saying there is no what to declare and array of things cause there absolutely is:
<complexType name="arrayofFoo">
<sequence>
<element ref="foo" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" />
</sequence>
</complexType>A valid instance:
<arrayofFoo>
<foo/>
<foo/>
<foo/>
</arrayofFoo>Which is entirely WS-I compliant.
The WS-I is trying to get people to NOT extend/inherit from the SOAP1.1 section 5 based array types (and corresponding wsdlsoap decls) but to take the above approach. I think the errata is working out the spec-ease with the clarification that the notion of an "array" does not exist in XML Schema proper - but the notion of a serial list of elements is so use that.
Is there a list of Axis-friendly blogs? Good web services blogs?
Dunno - that would be a nice addition to the docs/wiki?
Jim Murphy Mindreef, Inc.
