JAXB annotations for easy web service use

[jpechanec]

Hi,

I was thinking about the way how can be imlpemented an easy to start with way to work with web services. Currently you need to write either Java transformer or Smooks-based one. To be honest it is not the easiest way for a newcomer.

How about having a JavaBean that is annotated with JAXB annotations? It is very easy to use for simpler cases. During the buld process there will be a plug-in that will scan for @XmlRootElement annotation on Java classes. If founf then two transormers would be registered based on classname and associated namespace and element name.

The transformer implementation can be done in one of two ways

• using plain JAXB API
• a Smooks-config file will be generated to handle XML-to-Java binding and template generation

Or would it be better to not to do it duirng the build but add it as a feature to Forge?

What's your opinion?

[rick_wagner]

Hi Jiri,

Thanks for asking for opinions, it's nice to talk things over.

Could you please give us a little more context about the question:

- Is this for a web service we want to make available to others via Switchyard, or a web service someone else is making available that we want to consume?

- (Maybe for another topic) what about REST?

Thanks,

Rick

[tfennelly]

Hey Jiri.

I def think we should make it easy to use JAXB.  It should be possible for us to auto register a JAXBTransformer (to be implemented) to transformer <from> the SOAP payload type <to> the JAXB Java bean type and visa versa.  I don't think this would be hard at all.  Then... if you implement your service using JAXB annotated types...I think we could make automagically work.

BTW... with the version of Smooks in SwitchYard... you don't need to write templates for serializing Java to XML.  The Smooks <jb:bean> configs can now be used to not just read, but also write XML to/from a Java object model.  So... this is not the PITA it used to be... or at least not as big a PITA

[jpechanec]

Hi,

I was bitten by it when I was playing with SOAP inbound gateway. But IMHO this should work for both configurations - as in both cases there is a Java-to-XML and XML-to-Java transformation.

I have not thought about REST at all. IMHO there is no easy way how to expose a service via plain HTTP. But when it comes then we could re-use the JAXB approach as Jackson has a support for JAXB annotations too.

Maybe there will be an easy way to do an integration with RESTeasy - so that JAX-RS annotations will work as expected.

[rick_wagner]

Thanks, Jiri.

I like Tom's idea, 'automagic' would be great!

Rick

[tfennelly]

I created a JIRA for this: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/SWITCHYARD-314

[jpechanec]

Hmm, I created a JIRA for this: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/SWITCHYARD-313

[tfennelly]

Ooops.... sorry Jiri... I missed the notification of the issue you created... I closed the one I created.

[tfennelly]

This code is being bushed now as part of https://issues.jboss.org/browse/SWITCHYARD-313

There's a totally awesome ( ) screencast here demoing it http://www.screencast.com/t/mvqzPRGxk4g