.NET is multilingual, but it uses a single, common type system. Microsoft has a keen advantage here. They are the only vendor that produces the mappings between XSD and .NET types, so they can dictate how the annotations will be interpreted.
Given that we have about 20 different vendors competing in the Java arena, it just takes a lot longer to make decisions and define standards. One of the core tenets of SOAP/WSDL is that the specs define only the protocols and not the language bindings. It falls to the language communities to define standard language bindings. So this is a job for the JCP. I think it will be more than a year before any standards get produced. JAX-RPC 1.1 defined standard mappings between Java types and RPC/Encoded, but it doesn't do the same for Doc/Literal (even though Sun claims it does). It could be done as part of JAXB 2.0 or JAX-RPC 2.0, but I'm not convinced that it belongs in either one. Anyone on this list care to initiate a JSR? Anne -----Original Message----- From: Nelson Minar [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 7:47 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Need suggestions on web service interop and design >What would be ideal would be a standard (hopefully JCP-defined, or >perhaps W3C-defined) for converting JDK-1.5-attribute-enhanced Java >classes to *standard* WSDL. What is .NET / Indigo doing for this? Is there a readable overview? They have the same problem - even more so, since .NET is multilingual by design. >It seems from your post that even if you *do* maintain your WSDL by >hand, you are still pretty far from having a portably accessible SOAP >service, aren't you? Yes, writing WSDL first isn't a magic bullet. In fact, you've made the problem harder - now you have to verify your WSDL interoperates with Axis, too. The good news is you've decoupled yourself from the vicissitudes of whatever Axis may do when generating WSDL. Back with Axis 1.1 this was essential because of Axis bugs in document/literal WSDL. 1.2beta's WSDL isn't so bad - some minor BP1.0a issues, but otherwise it looks pretty nice. I still haven't tested its interop with .NET. >What's missing, it seems to me, is a canonical and sufficiently rich >standardization of how Java and WSDL are coupled. Similarly, such a >standard binding should exist for C#, Perl, etc., and should be >compatible with the Java/WSDL binding. I gather that's the problem JAXB is supposed to solve, even if the current JAX-RPC spec doesn't use it. Once you go the document/literal route, really all a SOAP stack is doing is gluing a bit of envelope around an XML data binding. So the focus is on the binding.
