xml-soap and parser (was Re: Getting Started)

[Gerd Aschemann <as...@informatik.tu-darmstadt.de>]

Jim Urban wrote/schrieb:
> I am new to SOAP.  I am project manager for a company that develops web
> applications in Java.  We need to have our Applets "talk" to our "Servlets",
> and I've been told that is what SOAP does.  I've looked at several SOAP
> websites, and all I can find are sample XML code and one ASP.  Does anyone
> have a simple (Hello World level) SOAP application written in Java (Applet
> and Servlet) that they could share?  I would also like to know what files
> (.jar ?) do I need to run a SOAP application.  If it matters, we are using
> Apache with Tomcat to serve our Servlets.  Finally, is there a SIMPLE
> tutorial that walks one through building their first SOAP application?

Hi,

I have a related question, or something you should think about. If you
use the Apache implementation you will not only need the soap.jar but
also XML Parser, in this case it's xerces. But consider the sizes of
the jars:

	soap.jar	~110 KB
	xerces.jar	~1,5 MB

If you plan an applet which is used by the standard Internet user with
a 33.6 Kbit/s modem or even an ISDN link (64 Kbit/s), they will get
download times of at least 240 seconds / 4 minutes (ISDN), only for the
middleware (plus your applet). I guess most users will abort the
transfer. 

Now the question is: Can the download size be drastically reduced,
ie., can xerces.jar be easily replaced by another parser? We (no I
don't speak for my university here, I do consulting for an Internet
startup besides) are in the same position of developing applets which
need a high sophisticated communication facility tunneled through
HTTP. And we have an XML parser of only 13 KB (jar). What are the
requirements to plug another parser into xml-soap?

Regards,
-- 
Gerd Aschemann --- Aschemann@Informatik.TU-Darmstadt.de
    Veröffentlichen heißt Verändern (Carmen Thomas)