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From: Christian Mayrhuber <cmayr@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at>
To: dev@cocoon.apache.org
Subject: Re: Calling web services from Cocoon
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 10:32:21 +0200
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On Monday 26 July 2004 16:12, Daniel Fagerstrom wrote:
> Hi Morley,
>
> I answer at Cocoon-dev as others might be interested.
>
> AFAIK there are no "current prefered method" for calling web-services. I
> and my colleagues, use the extended SourceWritingTransformer (SWT) and
> org.apache.excalibur.source.impl.HTTPClientSource that you can find in
> http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24402, (I updated it
> with new patches for the SWT and HTTPClientSource, you still need some
> stuff from the earlier patch, though). It should be possible to use with
> HTTPS if you connect https to o.a.e.source.impl.HTTPClientSourceFactory
> in cocoon.xconf, but I have not tested it.
>
> In some applications we have used the HTTPClientSource from flowscript
> code instead of calling it from the SWT, it requires some more work but
> gives better control of error handling (and also memory consumption for
> very large soap requests).
>
> My idea with extending the HTTPClientSource with SOAP (post)
> functionallity was to gather all uses of the
> o.a.jakarta.commons.HTTPClient in one component. Now similar things are
> done in various SOAP and Web-proxy components. From a technical POV I
> still think it is a good idea. There where however a number of other
> problems that have done that I not have put the code in the Cocoon CVS
> yet: I never succeeded in updating the avalon CVS, Excalibur have
> sometimes been quite hard to compile, there where talk about deprecating
> the Excalibur components, there where severe community problems in
> Avalon, it have been moved from Ant to Maven and from CVS to Subversion.
>
> Now, Excalibur has left Avalon and started a new top level project that
> seem to be healthy, so I'll try to integrate the extended SWT and
> HTTPClientSource as soon as I find some time for it ;)

I'm currently writing a hand crafted stub for a remote object, that I can use 
in both Flowscript and my custom generator. (The remote side has no wsdl)
If the remote site had a wsdl description you could use wsdl2java from the
axis project to generate such stub's. 
Stub's are the way to go, because their usage pattern is identical for 
EJB business logic and foreign web services.

My best experiance with cocoon has been so far with:
Presentation layer:
1. jxtemplate + cforms + flowscript + xslt/xslfo
2. custom geneator|custom transformer + xslt/xslfo

Business logic:
As java beans or as stubs trough webservices|ejb.

>
> I spent some time today trying to test the code with the samples that I
> submitted in the bugzilla entry, but the web services that I call from
> xmethods.net seemed to be down or at least very slow, anyone knowing
> about any other good webservice test sites, preferably with WSDL
> descriptions?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/104-6232418-6223133?node=3435361
You need to subscribe as developer, though.

-- 
lg, Chris