Simon Fell > Its just code > WSDL Programming Models

Monday, May 24, 2004

One re-occuring theme I see various WSDL's is that they are designed so that the generated proxy in tool X is easy to use, and not what makes the most sense on the wire. This is such a broken way of doing things that I don't know where to start, but lets start with this.

• For doc/literal SOAP services there is no standard for what the programming model for the generated client is, therefore what works well in tool X may be completely different in tool Y.
• Programming models are going to evolve, what looks good today maybe a complete lemon with next years tools
• The whole point of doc/literal web services is that the wire format is king, and how they map to environment Z is irrelivant.

SOAP Headers are a good example of where tools differ, Axis and .NET are similar in concept, but (with v1.1 Axis at least) are way more manual and complicated and non-obivous in Axis. In either case I personally don't like the "set the headers at the proxy class instance level" that both these tools use, and if you use the PocketSOAP WSDL Wizard, it will generate parameters in the operation method call to pass the headers in, making it way more obvious which headers are valid for which operations.

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