New to SOAP/WSDL/UDDI..couple of questions..

[Kevin Duffey <ke...@home.com>]

Hi all,

I just read about Web Services about a week ago. I heard of SOAP before but
never looked into it as I originally heard Microsoft created it. I now know
it was a few others too. I am impressed at what SOAP offers. I do have a few
questions though.

I am interested in integrating SOAP request/response into my own java built
mvc framework. I plan to use Apache SOAP. I am wondering if Apache SOAP can
only be accessed via its servlet, or can I use my own servlet to take an
incoming HTTP request, and convert it into a SOAP request, then get a SOAP
response back, that I can then send back via my servlet as part of the
HttpServletResponse?

While I am happy to see such a standard, is there much difference in using
SOAP (other than its simplicity supposedly and it being a standard) over say
me providing a servlet that anyone can send an HTTP request to, I decipher a
special request parameter, call on some business logic and return XML as the
response? I ask this because if I present this to my group, I need to make
sure it makes more sense to go this route. We plan to do legacy integration
with some AS400 mainframes, as well as some client software written in
Delphi, C++ and Java (three different apps running in three different
places). It seems to me if each client adds a SOAP request capability, they
could hit our server with the request, we centralize the logic there, and
the response is sent back as XML (according to SOAP). In this manner, we
could allow the mainframe, which currently uses direct modem lines to
connect to it, to talk with our web based app, as well as the Delphi client
and VC++ client...is this correct?

Without getting too technical (unless you want to spend time explaining),
how difficult is it to write a SOAP server and a SOAP client? I figured if I
can integrate SOAP capability into my MVC framework, that it would act as a
server to our central co-lo business logic. Clients would then have to add
SOAP support to send the requests to our server (via web url http requests)
and get the response back. Is this all there is to it? Or do I have to use
UDDI to find a Service, create an XML in memory following the WSDL format,
then send it, get back a WSDL xml block, de-serialize it, and so on?
Basically, can someone give me a rough idea of the flow from the client, to
the server and back?

Thanks.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: soap-user-unsubscribe@xml.apache.org
For additional commands, email: soap-user-help@xml.apache.org