Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Conforming to the Basic Profile
Problem
You want to make all of the choices you can to help ensure that your services are interoperable
across the greatest number of platforms.
Solution
Follow the guidelines of the WS Basic Profile 1.1. The most prominent of these are high-
lighted in the following discussion.
Discussion
The Web Services Interoperability Organization, or WS-I, consists of representatives from a
large number of vendors. It was created as a vendor consortium charged with establishing best
practices for the interoperability of web services. The working groups of WS-I create profiles
that highlight ways in which web services developers can promote interoperability in their
services. The WS-I Basic Profile covers standards, such as SOAP, WS-Addressing, MTOM,
XOP, and so forth, and indicates the kinds of choices developers should make in implementing
services. It indicates information about faults, messages, descriptions, discovery, and more.
Services that make the implementation choices indicated in the BP are said to conform to
some particular version of the BP—the most popular of which at this point is 1.1.
NOTE
You can read the BP at
http://www.ws-i.org
.
BP 1.1 is around 60 pages long, and I encourage you to read it if you're interested. But there
is a lot in the profile that vendor implementations of web services plumbing take care of for
you, so it's really not necessary for you to wade through the entire thing. This recipe attempts
to summarize the key points from a developer's point of view; it's not an exhaustive list, but
it's a good start:
SOAP envelopes have one body and cannot use DTD
SOAP envelopes have one body and cannot use DTD
The body of a SOAP envelope must have exactly zero or one child element, and it must
be namespace qualified. It must not contain processing instructions or a DTD.
