Chapter 23: Extensibility of ATL Server Web Services

Overview

IN CHAPTER 22 WE DESCRIBED some of the common issues that developers face when trying to get two different implementations of SOAP to communicate with each other. In this chapter we take a look at extending the ATL Server Web service model. Extensibility not only enables developers to solve some of the interoperability issues that may arise, but also allows for extension of Web services to support custom schemes and requirements.

The flexibility of the ATL Server design is a major asset in solving interoperability issues, and it s the focus of this chapter. In this chapter you ll learn how you can extend the ATL Server SOAP implementation to support nonstandard XML serializations, nonstandard transport channels, and custom data types.

After reading this chapter, you ll have a solution for using SOAP on various transport channels (i.e., replacements for HTTP). You ll also have a solution for hooking into the server-side processing of the parameters of a SOAP method, which allows you to treat a whole XML node passed as a parameter to a SOAP method without needing to instantiate a new parser. The last section shows how to extend the support for user types in the ATL Server implementation.

As you re looking at extending ATL Server Web services, it s useful if you have some level of familiarity with the ATL Server Web service implementation. Therefore, we start the chapter by briefly describing the processing model on the server side and then showing how to hook into this processing model.