Irv Salisbury III wrote: <snip/>
I did get great answers. One of the "hot" things a lot of our customers are looking at now is orchestrating web services together. Separating major pieces of the app behind REST style web services
I didn't connect the term "REST style web services", to WS with XML input. Can you expand a little bit about what you mean, are you refering to something like: http://www.intertwingly.net/stories/2002/07/20/restSoap.html ?
and then tying that together with things like BPEL. That is really where my question was driven at. I guess it would be interesting to see if there was any thought about integrating BPEL into cocoon. Kind of like a "flowscript" but in XML, but that could call cocoon pipelines, massage their content and string together reusable smaller pipelines. That was where my difficulty lies. I have a series of small, reusable pipelines, but that take XML in and return XML. So, I need to "orchestrate that". A key piece to this would be an architecture that let XML come into each internal cocoon call.
I know to little about WS orchestration for having any opinion about that yet. But I would be very interested in strenghtening Cocoon's abilities for XML in XML out.
I wrote the XModuleSource, ModuleSource and the SOAP stuff I mentioned with that intension. The Cocoon architecture seem for me ideal for document style SOAP handling, booth as a server and as a client. But more work is needed to actually make i easy to use for such things.
I have had some ideas about implementing postabillity for the cocoon: protocol. That would be usable if you have a set of functionalities in terms of WS written in Cocoon and want to reuse them within your webapp. Then I have felt that a postable cocoon: protocol would overlap to much in functionality with the (hopefully) forthcomming virtual transformer http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/VirtualComponents. But I don't know.
Unfortunatly I haven't found time to push this development any further.
You are very welcome to discuss about how we could make Cocoon more convenient for WS and WS orchestration here.
/Daniel
