[WSIF] New JNI provider with windows .NET, COM, and DLL transports

[Anthony Elder <an...@uk.ibm.com>]

John Catlin has written a WSIF Java Native Interface Provider and has
kindly said he will donate it to the Apache WSIF project.

I think this adds quite cool and powerful new functionality to WSIF,
enabling you to describe local native services with WSDL and have Java
clients invoke them via the WSIF API. The JNI provider is easily extensible
by using 'technology invoker' modules to bind to and invoke a specific
category of native implementation technology. The technology invokers allow
the provider to be  easily integrated to many platform-native
implementation technologies. This initial implementation comes with
technology invoker modules for the following:

   .NET Assemblies
   COM components,
   Win32 Dynamic Link Libraries.

The provider was based on a previous version of WSIF, I've updated it to
work with Apache WSIF, and created some JUnit testcases base on John's
samples. There is still work to be done but I think it would be better for
others to become familiar with it if I can contribute it now while there's
still work to do.

How can I go about contributing this? Integrating it with the existing WSIF
build isn't so straight forward as it includes C++ code for the JNI stub
and the various technology invoker modules.

Johns written some documentation in pdf format and I've built it into a
separate WSIF pluggable provider jar file, so perhaps initially I should
dump the whole lot into a proposals directory and anyone could have a look
and run the samples?

What do people think?

       ...ant

Anthony Elder
ant.elder@uk.ibm.com
Web Services Development
IBM UK Laboratories,  Hursley Park
(+44) 01962 818320, x248320, MP208.