[FYI:Announcement] Alpha-Release of the Zero-Effort Object Access Package (ZOAP)

["Jung , Christoph" <ch...@infor.de>]

<small>
Please excuse if you receive this mail several times or contains information
that is redundant to you. The following should
actually be regarded as a pre-alpha announcement since <a
href="mailto:Christoph.Jung@infor.de">I</a>´m on holiday until the 
4th of September such that you must rely on the sources and the 
yet limited documentation (unit test example+paper+javadocs) 
to experiment with ZOAP. This will soon change (beta-release, UML
description, and 
standard SOAP examples are underway), so I like to encourage you to
participate!
</small>  

<h1>Alpha-Release of the Zero-Effort Object Access Package (ZOAP)</h1>

<h3> From SOAP ... </h3>

The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/">Simple Object
Access Protocol 
(SOAP)</a> is a lightweight protocol for the exchange of information in a
globally 
distributed and loosely coupled environment. The current 
<a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/general/soapspec.asp">SOAPV1.1
specification</a>, 
inter alia authored by  <a href="http://www.microsoft.com">Microsoft
Corp.</a> and 
<a href="http://www.ibm.com">International Business Machines (IBM)</a>, has
been recently 
submitted to and acknowledged by the <a
href="http://www.w3c.org/">World-Wide Web 
Consortium (W3C)</a> (see <a
href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2000/May00/SoapW3CPR.asp">
this press article</a>).

<p>
By embracing existing Internet technologies, SOAP has the potential to
become a powerful and really 
interoperable standard for messaging middleware: The 
<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210">eXtensible Markup
Language (XML)</a> is chosen as a 
flexible and tolerant medium for encoding messages and their payload. For
shipping such envelopes in a 
resource-saving and possibly asynchronous manner, a variety of bullet-proof
and widely available transport 
protocols is applicable, such as the 
<a href="http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html">Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP1.1)</a> 
and the <a href="http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc821.html">Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol (SMTP)</a>.</font>
</p>
		
<h3> ... to ZOAP </h3>
 
The <a href="http://www.jboss.org/zoap/zoap.htm">Zero-Effort Object Access
Package (ZOAP)</a> is an Open Source 
SOAP implementation for the Java2 platform running under the 
<a href="license.html">GNU General Public License</a>. It aims to be a
lightweight and modular 
alternative to the existing reference implementations. Furthermore, ZOAP is
deeply integrated into the 
<a href="http://www.jboss.org/">jBoss application server</a> to
transparently turn 
<a href="http://www.j2ee.com/">Enterprise Java-Beans (TM)</a> into globally
interoperable web services. The source
distribution is available via cvs under
:pserver:anon@cvs.working-dogs.com/products/cvs/ejboss/zoap

<p>
ZOAP has been initiated as a part of <a href="http://www.infor.de/">infor
business solutions AG</a> application 
component platform. The current alpha is released in August 2000 and comes 
already with a decent set of <a href="#features">outstanding
functionalities</a>. 
The <a href="#todo">short-term roadmap</a> ensures that ZOAP, in combination
with the technologically 
advanced jBoss project, will develop into an up-front application
middleware. A first beta release 
is planned for September/October 2000.		
</p>

<h3> Contact </h3>

For questions around ZOAP, please contact <a
href="mailto:Christoph.Jung@infor.de">Dr. Christoph G. Jung</a> or
<a href="mailto:Michael.Wolber@infor.de">Michael Wolber</a>. For questions
around jBoss, please contact 
the <a href="mailto:jboss@jboss.org">jBoss Organisation</a>. 

<h2> Features </h2> 
   
<ul> 
<li> 100% pure and lightweight Java implementation. </li> 
<li> On-the-fly (De-)Serialization (SAX, no intermediate DOM is generated).
</li> 
<li> 
Extensible and expressive XML-Schema (draft as of May,2000) based Meta-Model
Architecture; 
Supports Null-values and Polymorhpism.
</li>
<li> 
Powerful Builtin Encoding-Style Compliant to Java2 Serialization (Including
Arbitrarily Nested Arrays and 
Collections). 
</li>
<li> "Automatic-Mode" for Generating Deployment Meta-Data via Java
Reflection. </li>
<li> "Bootstrapping-Mode" for Reading Deployment Meta-Data. </li>
<li> Service Contract Language is a Hybrid of the Microsoft Service Contract
Language and XmlSchema. </li>
<li> Builtin HTTP support (no servlet engine needed); Support for persistent
HTTP/1.1 connections. </li> 
<li> Transparent Proxy Access </li>
<li> Special Proxy Support for XML-enabled Web-Clients (no full
(de-)serialisation needed). </li> 
<li> Ready-Made Container-Plugin for jBoss2.0. Supports Stateless Beans.
</li>
</ul>
        
<h2> Roadmap </h2> 
   
<ul>
<li> Filter Architecture to Configure Verbosity and Depth of the
Serialisation Process </li>
<li> Support for Stateful Beans through Persistent HTTP/1.1 connections.
</li> 
<li> More Sophisticated (type-safe) Array and Collection Support:
Lazy-Modes, Delta-Interpretation. </li>
<li> Transactional and Asynchronous Messaging. </li> 
<li> Connection of the Filter Architecture to Security Roles. </li>
<li> Support for Soap-Encoding-Style, XMI-Encoding-Style and
Bean-Encoding-Style. </li>
<li> Integration with Java Messaging Service and EJB2.0´s message-based
beans. </li> 
<li> Enhanced Constraints and Validations as defined in XML-Schema. </li>
<li> SMTP-support </li>
</ul> 
 
<H2> Known Holes/Bugs </h2>

<ul>
<li> Binding.class indeed represents what is called an EncodingStyle in
SOAP. Should be renamed. </li>
<li> Lacking optmizing cache for Class-To-XmlType associations. </li>
<li> Lacking In-VM optimization for
SOAPInvocationHandler/SOAPTie/SOAPContainerInvoker. </li>
<li> Not all license annotations in the src-files have yet been updated to
GPL. </li>
<li> minOccurs and maxOccurs of elements are not yet supported. (default:
0/unbounded) </li>
<li> required of attributes is not yet supported. (default: false) </li>
<li> SOAPContainerInvoker takes connection data out of ejb-jar.xml and
jboss.xml, not the contract.scl.</li>
</ul>

<hr>

<small> 
Last change of $RCSfile: index.html,v $  by $Author: jung $ on $Date:
2000/07/06 14:11:07 $; 
See source for logging information.
<p>
Copyright (c) 2000 <a href="http://www.infor.de">infor business solutions
AG</a>, Hauerstrasse 12, 
D-66299 Friedrichsthal, Germany. All Rights Reserved.
</p>
<p>
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or 
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License 
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
</p>
<p>
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, 
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of 
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the 
GNU General Public License for more details. 
</p>
<p>
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License 
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software 
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307, USA.
</p> 
</small> 

Best,
Dr. Christoph G. Jung
Software Engineer
 
infor: business solutions AG
Vincenz-Prießnitz-Straße 3       Hauerstraße 12
D-76131 Karlsruhe, Germany     D-66299 Friedrichsthal
Fon +49(0)721.6634-0               +49(0)6897.9833-0
Fax +49(0)721.6634-200            +49(0)6897.9833-99
<http://www.infor.de>
<ma...@infor.de>