User's Guide, 1.2, custom (de)serialization

[Thad Humphries <th...@mindwrap.com>]

Hello.

I am fairly new to SOAP and Axis but I'd like to offer a write-up of custom 
(de)serialization and an example for the user's manual.  I've finally cracked 
this nut.  Moreover, I've managed to figure out custom (de)serialization for 
a class when it contains members that also require custom (de)serialization.  
In figuring this out, I created a simplified set of classes and 
(de)serializers.  What should I do first?  Whom do I need to talk to?  Where 
do I find formatting standards, etc.?

As background, I was recently asked to create a SOAP interface to my company's 
server product, Optix (http://mindwrap.com/), a document imaging, document 
management server, and workflow client-server application.

The problem I faced was custom (de)serialization.  I have a large set of Java 
classes that talk to a Sun RPC legacy application.  The Java classes were 
written without much (if any) thought to Beans (the Java API was to mimic the 
C/C++ API as closely as possible).  Hence BeanSerialization is not 
appropriate (methods like isFoo() or getFoo() often do not have an underlying 
foo member).  

Now that I seem to be on the road to success and I'd like to offer something 
back to Apache and Jakarta.

Thanks.  I hope I can be of help.