Thanks for your 2 cents I’m going to take a look to WS02, thanks for the hint.

Unfortunately, IT IS a real-world problem, since when you try to generate a service which takes as input an array of structures, for example, you obtain a WSDL containing the following type description (or something similar):

and the SAP system, on the other side, cannot generate (automatically) the proxy toward your service. Instead of that, you should obtain a WSDL type description similar to this:

But then you have to “teach” the library to correct deserialize the incoming SOAP request coming from the SAP system.

For this reason right now I’m modifying the NuSOAP library. Since I thought it could be of some interest to other developers I tried to contact Scott Nicholson, the mantainer, but at now I didn’t receive any reply. It would be helpful to test these modifications with him.

BTW, if he does not reply me, probably I’ll move my architecture over a more updated library.

Thanks for your interest

Having said that I’m not sure if the NuSOAP project is still maintained. Maybe you should also take a look at WSO2 which seems to be carrying the torch these days.

That’s my 0.02$

To me it seems that it still misses something: reading the WS-I BP 1.0 specifications:

http://www.ws-i.org/Profiles/BasicProfile-1.0-2004-04-16.html#refinement16556272

you can see that the way NuSOAP produces its WSDL in case you exchange an array (either as input or as output of your service), is exactly the INCORRECT way to codify arrays in WSDL (following WS-I).

As I wrong? Do you have any idea about how to solve this issue? I’m facing traying to produce a webservice that could be consumed by a SAP installation, that only accepts WS-I BP 1.0 services…

Thanks for the attention, and for the fable

You completely missed the purpose of web services. It’s a “simple” way to communicate data between interfaces (here languages) through HTTP (eliminating firewall issues, etc.). An entire application written on a J2EE platform, running an untold number of servlets isn’t (and shouldn’t) jump and buy a Windows box so they can “easily” implement web services with C#.

Here are three reasons companies use Java are:

1. It can run on Linux. (don’t scream Mono here, it’s only a good theory).
2. It’s free.
4. It’s more popular for web development

When I’m writing a Windows desktop app, C# is my choice almost every time, but I’m specifically targeting Windows’ users.

Since the project was based on infrastructure that was already there (eg. Jetspeed portal) Java was the only solution, but even if I had to design the whole thing from scratch I would still make similar technical decisions.

The reasons why one would go open source or Java for WS in 2007 should be self-evident

The first SOAP implementation I wrote was based on a SOAP 0.9.something spec. The spec was about 4 pages. Its spirit and intention could be easily understood, and it was quite possible for a single person to write code that implemented virtually everything in it.

Life was still pretty good with the 1.0 spec, the first submitted to W3C. However, as multiple people wrote implementations and tried to get them to work together, it became clear that the spec needed to be enhanced, and those who had worked on RPCs before knew that some sort of interface definition was necessary (which became WSDL).

Unfortunately, at this point SOAP was hijacked by (1) lovers of all things XML and (2) lovers of big-bang distributed computing (namely DCE and DCOM technology).

I was a developer on Apache SOAP, which implemented the SOAP spec, but not even WSDL, let alone the other specs that were already being envisioned by the people who gave birth to the Apache Axis project. As Microsoft, IBM, Sun, et al. implemented all the specs being generated, those of us who had worked on small SOAP implementations knew we had been outflanked and were fighting a losing battle. There was no way we could keep up.

I subsequently needed SOAP for a PHP project, discovered NuSOAP, got to know Dietrich through the mailing list, contributed code, and became a developer on the project. NuSOAP aims about as high as a small part-time team can: implement as much of SOAP 1.1 and WSDL 1.1 as people really seem to need, react to new needs and issues as best as possible, and hope that Microsoft and the rest of them don’t stop supporting these earlier specs.

Why did you choose Java?