Re: SOAP Listeners

> Until yesterday I was under the assumption that in order to process
SOAP
> messages on the server side I needed to write my own SOAP Listener.
> Someone mentioned to me that they thought SOAP listeners were
available
> for various
> platforms that handled receiving the SOAP message, security and
parsing.
> The listener would then spawn a specific server and pass the SOAP
message.

Many folks use the term "SOAP Stack" instead of "SOAP Listener" but
vocabulary aside that's the general idea.  The fact that SOAP, XML and
several SOAP derivative technologies (WS-Inspection, WS-Security, WS-*,
etc) are standardized means that you can use toolkits to do much of the
heavy lifting.  The nice ones offer various extensibility hooks to let
you play with the message pipeline and what not.  If you are destined to
implement your service on AIX, the IBM WSTK is the obvious candidate.  I
haven't done much with the recent bits but IBM is the 800lb gorilla in
this space so there is plenty there to help you out.

The parsing and mapping from XML to your java types is something the
toolkit does too.   Theoretically, you can live a very happy and
productive life without ever seeing an XML angle bracket.

> I have already written a simple SOAP Server in JAVA without any
problem
> but
> haven't tackled parsing the message or security yet.
> thoughts???

Not sure if I understand where you are and where you want to go.  Your
toolkit will do the message parsing and type translation so the first
part is a no-op.  Security is a real can-o-worms.  There are plenty of
options but most are immature.  The simplest method is to only secure
your transport layer.  This is nice since it lets you effectively deal
with clear text at the application layer.  The most common way is to use
http/ssl.  There are other options including encrypting sensitive
element data in the XML and WS-Security.

Jim

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