Ananth Krishna wrote:
I had some questions/suggestions regarding the Super Dynamic Invoker
(..and subsequently wsif and axis). I thought I d share them on the
wsif-dev list as it seemed most appropriate to post it here (apologies
if it wasn't the right place for it)
A) Is the SDI part of WSIF ?
no
If not will be included in future releases
soon ?
possibly SDI or some form of it - concept and capabilities are more
important but all ultimately depends on user feedback - do you like it
and how to improve it :)
B) On the developer list of Axis, I see there will be support for XML
Infoset soon. I am assuming we are seeing this as being a good thing for
Dynamic invocation using complex xsd types in some ways ?If so, will
WSIF move towards using this feature in Axis when it is available ?
absolutely - i am main supporter of having XML Infoset API and it is my
main focus in work on Axis2
Th reason I ask all this is that currently we have a custom web service
invocation framework that we developed a few years back when there was
little or no support for dynamic invocation using complex xsd types and
the ones available then were a bag of spanners and very hard to work
with. Besides, we also had to plug-in a WS-Security implementation to
our framework and WSS4J wasn't available then.
However, our implementation suffers the same limitations as the Dynamic
Invoker (in the initial/current? release of WSIF) in that we generate
java types using castor bindings to invoke services. In our upcoming
projects a client framework for dynamically invoking services without
having to explicitly generate java types from xsd's or use generated
stubs is very important in our software architecture.
Initially WSIF seemed like a good option but we realised soon that it
suffered from :
A) having to generate java types for complex xsd types.
B) I believe sun licences for JMS and J2EE are too restrictive for us.
C) The official, stable release of WSIF (2.0 I think) uses a vintage
version of axis which doesn't include some bug fixes that we require
(including a patch for Attachments that we submitted and is in Axis
1_2RC2)
this is fixed in CVS that uses the latest Axis 1.2RC2 - i should make
an interim wsif release soon to gather more feedback
Our approach to using WSIF currently was to try and have a version that
is perhaps WSIF Lite (by ripping off support for JMS,J2EE bindings and
having only a light weight web service client infrastructure). As we
were thinking about it, we came upon the Super Dynamic Invoker which
seems in some ways like WSIF Lite. If our thinking regarding the SDI is
right, it would be good to collaborate efforts on it to achieve more
than we hope to if we went on our own, say..
Ananth, i am ver glad to hear it.
It would be great if we could discuss in detail use cases and list of
requirements for WSIF dynamic invoker - for example how exactly to deal with
complex types?
It would be good to know what the core developers on wsif think about
this..
as you are interested in shaping future of WSIF you may soon become one
of them. currently most of initial developer are no longer actively
working on WSIF so we definitely need "fresh blood" :)
thanks,
alek
--
The best way to predict the future is to invent it - Alan Kay
