Chapter 22: Interoperability with ATL Server Web Services

Overview

THE IDEA BEHIND WEB services is to offer a lingua franca for communication between heterogeneous pieces of software over the Internet. This idea can work only as long as all the implementations respect the rules of the game. This means that for each given SOAP message, a SOAP payload generated by one implementation must be semantically similar to one generated by any other implementation.

This chapter presents a view on the interoperability efforts, with particular focus on the problems encountered during the interoperation testing of the ATL Server implementation. In addition to identifying some of the common interoperability problems, we discuss the ways in which some of these problems were solved and present workarounds for many common problems.

The discussion on SOAP interoperability is based on version 1.1 of the SOAP specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508) and version 1.1 of WSDL (http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-wsdl-20010315). SOAP interoperability requires that the user has some level of familiarity with Web services (the SOAP specification) and WSDL. Some knowledge of the ATL Server SOAP implementation would be helpful, although this isn t required (see Chapters 10 and 19 for more information on these topics).

In this chapter we provide solutions for some common interoperability issues. By the end of this chapter you should have a good understanding of the implications of interoperability, a clear perspective on the problems that may occur, and knowledge of a few techniques that you can use to solve these and other problems that may arise.