SAAJ and implementation

[Nick Laqua <Ni...@newtron.net>]

Hi all,

we are implementing our own integration tool which also contains a SOAP layer for packaging arbitrary messages (no rpc style). The SOAP shall be encapsulated and knows nothing about the payload within SOAP Body.

During our search we came across SAAJ and the reference implementation by SUN which seems to address exactly this topic. Unfortunately, we found no way to add whole xml parts to the SOAP body (for instance by supplying a org.w3c.dom.Element or an InputStream). It seems that the reference implementation by SUN and the SAAJ api requires one to construct the payload element by element.

When looking at the axis examples and the axis source code, we found out that you have your own SOAPBodyElement implementation (org.apache.axis.message.SOAPBodyElement) which implements the standard interface (javax.xml.soap.SOAPBodyElement) but additionally it contains exactly those methods we desperately need (construction using InputStream or org.w3c.dom.Element).

So probably we will use Axis for this part, referencing your implementation directly. But in the long run, this undermines the whole idea of standard interfaces doesn't it ?

I would be interested to hear what were your opinions and reasons for extending the "standard" and if you expect SAAJ to be extended in this way one day.

Cheers,

Nick