More ramblings one messages

[Doug Davis <du...@us.ibm.com>]

So, let's say someone wants to set-up an intermediary
and they want this intermediary to act as a controller
of sorts.  This controller will take the SOAP message
and forward it on to another SOAP node for processing.
When the message comes back, this controller then
forwards it on to another SOAP node, so you get a chain
that looks like:

 ->forwarder#1->forwarder#2->forwarder#3
   handler      handler      handler

One possible reason for this set-up is that someone might
want to use resources on a remote host but doesn't want
to install the actual business logic on this intermediary
machine.

Anyway, the reason for bringing this up is that when we've
talked about Axis supporting intermediaries I think most of
us have probably assumed that the pivot-point handler would
be the "forwarder" and it would take the request message,
send it on to the other soap node, take any response and
place it in the response message of the message context.
Well, in this multi-forwarder scenario, it isn't clear to
me which one (if any) should be the one that switches the
"current message" from the request to response.  And of course
one you have on of them do that, you can't reorder them
easily because some will be "request" forwarders and some
will be "response" forwarders.

Just got me wondering about the single-message design
again and how that makes this problem a little easier to
solve too.  Oh well - back to your regularly schedule
programming...

-Dug