the corner office

A busy week of studying and work. I'm spending some time with SOAP, (and Apache Axis in particular), which is what all the cool kids are playing with. It doesn't take long to realise that flinging basic xsd:string parameters around is pretty straightforward, but that complex types are a whole 'nother ballgame. There are tools which autogenerate WSDL from Java and Java from WSDL, but the generated code isn't always that pretty (or robust).

Axis allows you to work with SOAP across the entire spectrum of abstraction, from generated stubs to XML manipulation, right down to raw streams. The one thing that the multitude of articles and tutorials don't cover, is just what point in the spectrum makes sense depending on what your performance/complexity/maintainability requirements are.

Update: apropos - today's Dilbert.