Creating a Document-Literal Web Service

[DougIBM]

I'm trying to help a customer set up a Document Literal service under his CF
environment. I'll be calling from an Axis/Castor client, but I'm not really
even at that point yet.

I want to know what his options are for using well-specified Schema types for
the message payloads. He's actually got some COBOL records and auto-generated
Schemas from those, and I finally got a successful include of those Schemas
into an enclosing Schema, which is in turn included in a hand-coded WSDL file.
I had hoped he could use that WSDL file to generate a stub of his CF service,
and fill in the logic from there.

This is the Web Services process I've grown accustomed to with other
environments, but he seemed confused by my description in these terms. So I've
downloaded the CF MX7 and DreamWeaver trials/developer editions, and now I'm
confused too. This process doesn't seem to be at all supported in CF, and I
can't find anything but the most rudimentary documentation of Doc-Lit Web
Services at all. (Plus, DW doesn't seem to recognize the latest cfcomponent
attributes that were added for Doc-Lit support.)

First, can I even do what I'm asking? Second, if not the full process, is
there some way my customer can define his CF service to use Schema types from
these external Schema files? Also, what he's doing with the message payload is
actually passing it in its entirety, as an XML document, to this COBOL program
that has it's own parsing, so he doesn't want CF to pull out the individual
fields. The ultimate goal is for us to have a WSDL/Schema that he can deploy
from and that I can build Java stubs for. A nice feature would be for CF to
also validate the incoming messages against that WSDL/Schema, but his COBOL
will validate the Schema, so that's not absolutely required.

Help, please!

BTW, Tom, I recognize your name from the Axis groups, I believe as an Axis
developer, no?

[DougIBM]

Bump

[Tom Jordahl]

Hi Doug,

I can understand why you are confused.

CF tried to make publishing a web server very simple for the CFML developer.
Basically you can create a "ColdFusion Component" (CFC) which contains
methods that you publish as operations in a web service. This is very
similar to publishing an existing Java class with public functions, as many
people do in Axis. In fact, CF translates the CFC code in to a Java
skeleton, which is what the Axis engine in CFMX actually 'publishes' as the
web service and uses to generate WSDL. This hides the complexity of creating
WSDL and Schema, marshaling and unmarshaling arguments, and the other
'stuff' involving XML.

It sounds like what you would like is a simple CFML page that accepts the
raw XML as a POST and then passes it along to something else. You could then
hand craft a WSDL and publish that as a static page. This would not leverage
the Web Services facility of CFMX at all, but it doesn't sound like you need
the 'magic', you just want an some XML.

There is no "WSDL2CFML" functionality - specifically for generating a
service side CFC for a particular WSDL.

Yes, I am a developer of Apache Axis too.

--
Tom Jordahl
Macromedia Server Development