Web Services on Drugs

When you are dealing with Web services, there is a common problem that you have to deal with; Capturing SOAP request/response as they flow on the wire between the client and the service endpoint. Tug's blog entry give you all the steps required to be successful with the setup, when using Oracle BPEL process manager. I have to try using Tug's instruction in conjunction to Mindreef's SOAPscope to see how it works. At first, it looks very promising. -ecco

If you are looking for something to do over the weekend, as the rain returns here are some cool links I wanted to share: For the youngsters: Visit http://www.jigkids.com/ and complete your own puzzle online. For the older: The Sudoku of the day And for the rest of us, just a little reading from the 2005 Darwin Awards finalists. -ecco

For some it's obvious. As it was not for me, I decided to put it on e-paper so that you can google this when you need it. If you want to exchange XML Document, meaning the whole content of an XML file, with Web services, you should not use org.w3c.dom.Document or any other object representation of your XML DOM tree in your method signature. Instead, you should be using a Plain Old Types (POT) like String or byte[]. Take the following code sample, here using JSR-181 annotations: @WebMethod public Document getDocument(String input) {   Document res = null;   try {     DOMParser builder = new DOMParser();     builder.parse(new StringReader(STR_XML_DOCUMENT));     res = builder.getDocument();   } catch (Exception ex) {     ex.printStackTrace();   }   return res; } private static final String STR_XML_DOCUMENT =   "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>\n" +  ...

There is a challenge that is hard to overcome at first; making sense of error messages. You can always Google with the text of the error, “unexpected null value for literal data” and hope to be lucky . If you are using Oracle Application Server 10.1.3.0, here is the explaination for the message and two ways out. The Exception: unexpected null value for literal data at oracle.j2ee.ws.common.util.exception.JAXRPCExceptionBase.<init>(JAXRPCExceptionBase.java:52) at oracle.j2ee.ws.common.encoding.SerializationException.<init>(SerializationException.java:26) ... The relevant schema: <complexType name="Customer"> <sequence> <element name="address" type="tns:Address"/> <element name="firstName" type="string"/> <element name="lastName" type="string"/> </sequence> </complexType> A sample code that will cause this exception: public void testServ() throw...