You are viewing a plain text version of this content. The canonical link for it is here.
Posted to soap-dev@xml.apache.org by sa...@apache.org on 2001/05/24 00:16:08 UTC
cvs commit: xml-soap/java/docs/guide interop.html
sanjiva 01/05/23 15:16:07
Added: java/docs/guide interop.html
Log:
first cut of interop doc - not done yet, but will be done tonite.
Revision Changes Path
1.1 xml-soap/java/docs/guide/interop.html
Index: interop.html
===================================================================
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage Express 2.0">
<title>Interoperability with Other SOAP Implementations</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<h2 align="center">Interoperability with Other SOAP
Implementations</h2>
<p align="left">Interoperability was one of the main reasons for
creating SOAP in the first place. However, as with any non-trivial
specification, the SOAP specification leaves several items up to
interpretation. As a result (and also due to simply non-conforming
implementations) a SOAP envelope generated by one SOAP
implementation may not be properly understood by another
implementation. </p>
<p align="left">There is an active effort to improve the
interoperability of various SOAP implementations being driven by
folks in the <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/soapbuilders"
target="_top">"SOAP Builders" mailing list</a>. Some of
the issues / solutions described here arose / found by Apache
SOAPers active in that effort (including Sam Ruby, Dug Davis and
Glen Daniels).</p>
<p align="left">If you would like to read more about interop
problems, <a
href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/general/soapinteropbkgnd.asp"
target="_top">see the article by Keith Ballinger on MSDN</a>. In
that article Keith indentifies 3 types of common interop problems:
transport problems, XML problems and SOAP problems. This document
explains how you can configure and improve the interoperability
of Apache SOAP with other SOAP implementations for each of the 3
types of problems. It is important to note that interoperability
testing is an on-going task and that there are bound to be many
other issues that come up in the future.</p>
<h3 align="left">Transport Problems</h3>
<p align="left">The difficulty arises primarily with the "SOAPAction"
header that SOAP uses. The value of the SOAPAction header is
allowed to be null (that is, no value is specified), the empty
string ("") - which means that no "intent" is
specified, or an arbitrary quoted string. Apache SOAP client-side
APIs have no difficulty generating any of these SOAPAction values.
As such we do not believe there are any transport level
interoperability problems with Apache SOAP.</p>
<p align="left">Another common use of SOAPAction is as the
mechanism to route or dispatch the incoming SOAP envelope to the
target code that processes it. Apache SOAP does not support that
- dispatching is done currently based on the namespace URI of the
first child element of the <SOAP:Body> element only. That
can potentially cause interop problems as SOAP does not preclude
unnamespaced body entries. If an Apache SOAP user wishes to
implement a service that must receive and process unnamespaced
body entries, then currently there is no built-in mechanism to
route those requests. </p>
<h3 align="left">XML Problems</h3>
<p align="left">- schema issues (1999, ..)</p>
<h3 align="left">SOAP Problems</h3>
<p align="left">- xsi:type dependency stuff</p>
<p align="left">- lack of access to headers</p>
<p align="left">- mustUnderstand stuff</p>
</body>
</html>