Java Web Services in a Nutshell

Serialization and Type Mappings

In Section 6.6, earlier in this chapter, you saw that there are two different sets of encoding rules that are commonly used when creating SOAP messages — SOAP section 5 encoding, which is typically used for RPC-style operations, and literal encoding, which is the usual choice for a document-style operation. In order to create a SOAP message from the name and parameters of a method call or from its return value and output parameters, the JAX-RPC runtime has to know how to convert the Java primitive types and the Java objects used in the method definition into the corresponding XML representation that will appear in the message. The process of converting a Java type to its XML representation is called serialization , and the reverse process is termed deserialization . A class that can perform these conversions is called a serializer or a deserializer. In practice, both the serialization and deserialization rules for a specific type are implemented in the same class, which I will refer to simply as a serializer. In this section, we look at how JAX-RPC handles the serialization and deserialization processes. In case you think that you don’t really need to know much about this somewhat esoteric issue, in the course of this discussion you’ll see that you can’t always assume that JAX-RPC will arrange for all of the serializers that you require to be available at runtime. This section shows you how to make sure that they are.

Type Mappings and the Type Mapping ...