Posts Tagged ‘Jax-ws’
Using RPC-style, encoded Axis 1 webservices with spring-remoting
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Posted in: Axis 1, Jax-ws, Spring-Remoting J2EE, System architecture, java, open source.
Preamble
When working with enterprise integration you will quite often deal with legacy systems integration.
I recently had the case where integration of webservices was requested, and much to my surprise there are huge issues when attempting to integrate old webservices (as in pre axis2 and pre jax-ws).
These webservices use outdated or unsupported methods, such as rpc-style/encoded communication, or even worce, outdated elements in the XML messages, for instance <multiref>’s. Having to integrate such services does of course imply that you cannot change anything on the server side, and thus such an outdated format must still be consumed.
This is a huge problem, since current WS implementations, such as the popular axis2 framework, do simply not support these formats.
What surprised me the most about this is that webservices are designed to make systems independent by defining a common communication and data format, which is the exact opposite of what is going on here – and these formats are not that old, we are probably talking 4-5 years.
Developers facing these problems are taking rather desperate measures to work around these problems, such as using on-the-fly XSLT transformation to convert incoming and outgoing WS messages. However, this binds your application even stronger to the outdated format and specific service data.
In my case I wanted to use Spring-remoting. Since the service was RPC-style, I wanted to use the JaxRpcPortProxyFactoryBean to create an on-the-fly proxy implementing the service interface. What I did not want to do is having to write any additional code to consume the service. Furthermore, I wanted the complex objects transferred by the services to be represented by standard JAVA beans, and not be generated using the wsdl2java axis1 tools. Here is how I got this to work.
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