Web Services on Drugs

If you are trying to use a .NET client to invoke some Web Service, and you are getting an empty result (or return value) one of the possible explaination is that the format of the SOAP response on the wire does not match the format advertise in the WSDL. Unlike most JAX-RPC stacks who will fault in such case, when deserialization fails (XML 2 JAVA), the .NET stack ignore the unexpected nodes, and continue processing with the default value for the types, based on the CLR dafault behaviour. When you are in doubt, remember to capture the SOAP payload for manual introspection and try with another client stack. -ecco

For those that want to interface the Oracle Database with Web Service, there is a nice book just good released for you: Oracle Database Programming Using Java and Web Services , by Kuassi Mensah

I got catch by surprise a few times, trying to capture SOAP messages with JDeveloper's integrated HTTP Analyzer and figured out it's worth sharing with others. Here it is. When using JDeveloper's HTTP Analyzer to capture messages exchanges, I sometime get the wrong proxy setting, forget about it, fix it and try to run, run and run without to see any message captured. In reallity, messages are captured but are not displayed when you keep the focus on the Data pane. Remember to watch the next/previous message buttons in the toolbar. If they are blue (not disabled), you have message captured, as shown in Figure 2. Just click on the button to display one of the messages. You can also switch back to the history pane, as shown in Figure 3. Here are the screens, with some hint highlighted with red-circle. Figure 1 - HTML Analyzer with focus on the Data pane Figure 2 - Same HTML Analyzer with focus on the Data pane, after running the test Figure 3 - HTML Analyzer with focus on the

If you are into Web Service, and are trying to understand where the industry is going, you should take a few minutes and listen to this interview on the ServerSide: Ted Neward - Web Services and Security . If you don't have the time to check it out, here are some highlight from the transcript: I have to go to each of the vendors and I have to beat them over the head with a two-by-four to stop making web services look like RPC calls. Start from your code, just sprinkle some web service magic pixie dust on it and lo and behold you have a web service, bad things, bad, bad, bad, bad. I need to beat the vendors over the head to stop doing that... That’s just not going to work. If you're out there today building a web service and you're not downloading the other platform and working with that as part of your test suites. If you're building a Java web service, you have to download the .NET framework, you have to download NUnit and you have to write your unit tests as NUnit .N

Recently, as I was following our IT policies and run Windows Update, I got the following message: "This item updates the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font included in some Microsoft products. The font has been found to contain unacceptable symbols. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer." How can Microsoft expect you will run your business on Windows 2003 Advanced Server and be OK the restart your computer for a silly font with a symbol in the wrong place? I don't get it... For the full story, check this detailed blog entry .