Status

The current Alpha 0.2a release is a technology demonstration. Although usable for simple document/literal web services, it does have some significant limitations.

The Alpha 0.2a Fault handling is based on the approach used by JAX-RPC, which converts exceptions thrown during server processing to SOAP Fault responses, and converts received SOAP Fault responses to java.rmi.ServerExceptions on the client. In the future, support may be added to interpret the type of object returned by a service call as a Fault by reference to the service definition. Support may also be added for the service method to access the SOAP context and set Fault response information directly.

Also in future releases, the service interface will be extended to support a wrapped style of operation, where the root of the doc/lit request body is just a container for individual child elements representing the parameters in a method call. This should be an easy change on the server, but the client interface is a little messier. Supporting either typed method calls or wrapped style will require code generation for the client interface, which probably means processing a WSDL service description in order to decide what to generate.

Beyond these issues, using JibxSoap for enterprise-level web services will require the addition of support for WS-Security and some form of attachments, as well as other types of extensions in the future. These extensions can all be done within the JibxSoap framework, but the amount of work involved will probably require support through some form of commercial license. If you have a need for enterprise-level support with JibxSoap please contact Dennis Sosnoski directly.