IBM's Reference Implementation for SOAP v1.1 Released with Full Source under IPL

Hi Everyone,

We just sent our implementation of SOAP v1.1 to IBM alphaWorks. It
is a mostly complete implementation architected to support:
    - doing messaging with SOAP
    - doing RPC with SOAP
    - multiple transport protocols
    - multiple encoding styles
We have implemented the SOAP encoding style as well as an XMI encoding
style. For transport, we support HTTP and SMTP.

The implementation is in Java and uses JSPs on the server side.

In addition to the base protocol, on the server side we provide an
infrastructure to deploy and manage multiple services. This allows
a single SOAP router to support SOAP enabling any Java class. We
have an IDL for SOAP in progress and expect to release that early
next week. We plan to generate the IDL from the deployment descriptor
which we already have (in XML). On the client-side, we provide an
API which can be used to do RPC over any of the supported transports
using any of the supported encodings. The RPC over SMTP impl is
about 90% done; the code to pick up the returned result via POP3 is
not integrated fully yet (it's in another class). The server side for
SMTP posted requests is implemented as a POP3->HTTP->SMTP bridge.
Once we have the IDL is done, we plan to generate client-side stubs
as well.

The entire infrastructure is pluggable; i.e., we do not assume specific
transports or encodings. The code we provide for transports/encoders
implement the interfaces we have defined and plug into the rest of
the infrastructure using defined entry points.

Documentation is a bit sparse right now, but we're working on it!

The software is released under the IBM Public License with full source.
We envision making this a true open-source project in the future.

The distribution is available at:
    http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/tech/soap4j

Comments / suggestions / bugs are welcome!

Matthew J. Duftler, Sanjiva Weerawarana, Paco Curbera.
Component Systems Group, IBM TJ Watson Research Center,
Hawthorne, NY 10532.

Received on Saturday, 29 April 2000 07:01:37 UTC