Java and XML, Second Edition

Going Further

Although you can now do everything in SOAP you knew how to do in XML-RPC, there is a lot more to SOAP. As I said in the beginning of the chapter, two important things that SOAP brings to the table are the ability to use custom parameters with a minimal amount of effort, and more advanced fault handling. In this section, I cover both of these topics.

Custom Parameter Types

The most limiting thing with the CD catalog, at least at this point, is that it stores only the title and artist for a given CD. It is much more realistic to have an object (or set of objects) that represents a CD with the title, artist, label, track listings, perhaps a genre, and all sorts of other information. I’m not going to build this entire structure, but will move from a title and artist to a CD object with a title, artist, and label. This object needs to be passed from the client to the server and back, and demonstrates how SOAP can handle these custom types. Example 12-8 shows this new class.

Example 12-8. The CD class

package javaxml2; public class CD { /** The title of the CD */ private String title; /** The artist performing on the CD */ private String artist; /** The label of the CD */ private String label; public CD( ) { // Default constructor } public CD(String title, String artist, String label) { this.title = title; this.artist = artist; this.label = label; } public String getTitle( ) { return title; } public void setTitle(String title) { this.title = title; } public String getArtist( ...