Tag: JAX-WS

JAX-WS Payload Validation, and Websphere 7 Problems

A WSDL file contains a reference to an XSD document which defines the data structures which can be sent to the service over SOAP. In an XSD, you can define a Type for an element, or things like the elements cardinality, whether its optional or required, etc. When the web server hosting a web service is called, it receives a SOAP envelope which tells it which web service is being called. It could (and you might expect it does) validate the body of the SOAP message against the XSD in the WSDL... but it doesn't. Is this bad? Well, most clients will be generated from the WSDL, so you can assume that the type safety is respected. Saying that, it's not something the server can guarantee, so it needs to check that say a field that is supposed to contain a date, really does contain a date, and not some garbled text that is meant to be a date. But more importantly, something which a client does not guarantee, is whether all required fields in the data structure are actually present. To check this, you can validate incoming SOAP bodies against the XSD. The way to do this, is by using "Handlers". The JAX-WS specification defines two kinds, namely, SOAP Handlers and Logical Handlers. The SOAP kind is useful for accessing the raw SOAP envelope, for example to log the actual SOAP message. The logical kind is useful for accessing the payload as an XML document. To configure a handler,…

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Professional enterprise JAX-WS in no time at all?

My current client is talking about migrating to Java 1.6 and a Java EE 5 app server (we are currently still on 1.5 because our data center only supports an older app server). One reason for doing so is that this stack supports JAX-WS. Not knowing much about JAX-WS, I decided it was time to take a look. The Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) is basically a specification of how to deploy and use web services in the latest Java runtime. My first question was "whats so good about it compared to Apache Axis 1.4", which I've used successfully plenty of times in the past. Not only does JAX-WS offer improved performance as its based on StAX (a more efficient streaming pull parser for XML), but its also a standard. Axis isn't a standard, even though it is extensively used. JAX-WS is partially part of Java SE 1.6 and the bits which are not part of it, namely the server side implementation, can be theoretically exchanged without breaking anything, because all implementations implement the given specs. So, no vendor lockin; and you get choice over implementations. What more could one ask for... So I went with what I knew, and downloaded Axis2 which is an implementation of JAX-WS among other things and started to migrate a simple web service which had run under Axis 1.4. But it wasn't as simple as I had hoped. The requirement was to create a web service based on an existing Java "service"…

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