Contract-First Web Services in practice - part 1 of 5.

I've recently been working on a SaaS project where I'm integrating different ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) into a SaaS aggregation platform with a market place environment. Users come to the marketplace, purchase subscriptions to the ISVs' applications and realtime provisioning is expected. An exciting opportunity to test a SOA paradigm as SOAP web-services are a crucial medium of the SOA model and was the first solution to jump to my mind.

Once my approach was selected, my next task was to define a service specification that I would expect the ISVs to implement. This started out as a document with a list of methods and attributes encompassing the functionality I would expect the ISVs to expose. Once this was done, I needed to create a reference implementation in .NET, Java and PHP, and that's where the problems began.

My aim was to create a single WSDL which could easily be implemented in the 3 main programming languages so that only a single client is written. The main issues I had to address are summarized below:

• Creating a consistent doc/literal format style WSDL
• Working effectively with arrays in XSD schema
• Working effectively with typed exceptions - what is the best way of creating Soap Faults?
• JAX-WS, JAX-RPC, Axis, .NET ASMX, WCF, PHP-SOAP, NU-SOAP - just a snapshot of the different SOAP stacks in common use.
• Contract-First SOA

I'll be detailing the challenges I faced in a series of 5 tutorials on how to create a non-trivial WSDL and implement it in the 3 programming languages.