Adding a deserializer for a new type

Scott, and other listmembers,

First of all, thanks for all your help so far. I have the system 
working, and my new SOAP-based java proxy object slots into the web app 
where the old proprietary one used to go easily (I generate it with 
exactly the same signature). With compression, packets are ~35% of their 
full size...

Now I want to encode some returning binary data from my DBL server as a 
hex string. so a

record
    a   ,[3]i1, 1, 2, 3

which is how you declare a 3 byte array with initial values in DBL will 
become

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='ISO-8859-1'?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
 xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema-instance"
 xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema"
 xmlns:xse="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
 xmlns:fcl="urn:forward-comp.co.uk">
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
<fcl:methodNameResponse 
SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/">
<return xsi:type="xse:int">1</return>
<paramname xsi:type="fcl:hexString">000102</paramname>
</fcl:methodNameResponse>
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

How can I register a Deserializer so that this is deserialized into a 
StringBuffer?

I have written a Deserializer class (HexStringDeserializer) which uses 
DomUtils to get the childCharacterData from the Element, parses out the 
hex pairs, and returns the Bean - it's based on the default SOAP 
StringSerializer.

How do I *register" that class so that when SOAP sees the above XML, it 
calls my class?

I'm doing this because I'm concerned about the performance of SOAP's 
Base64 class. Well, I'm concerned about the performance of SOAP. It 
takes much longer to marshall and unmarshall the parameters than the 
previous proprietary RPC protocol. I've written a lightweight 
BeanSerializer class which does it's own introspection just using Class 
and Method - avioding the java.beans package (it caches Collections of 
getter and setter methods in HashMaps keyed by the Class of the bean). 
This is faster than the SOAP one, but the overall performance of the 
client is still slow.

Tailing the log file on my server, it moves in jerks. The Envelopes 
arrive, are processed and and Envelope is sent back all in one rush. 
Then there's a definite pause before the new request from the SOAP 
client comes in. The bottleneck is on the client side, and I suspect 
it's the complex marshalling/unmarshalling.

I do a subjective test where I download an 800K BMP. The old web app 
gets it in a couple of seconds, the new SOAP-based one edges up the 
screen like a 3600 baud modem I'll never sell that to the boss!

Well, anyway, thanks for any help,

Nigel

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