The idea is to provide a really simple & lightweight SOAP stack which can be extended & connected to any transport and binding technology.

Pluggable transports

With ActiveMQ we've got most common transports covered (TCP, SSL, UDP, multicast, JGroups, JRMS, JXTA, NIO, AIO, Discovery (Zeroconf/ ActiveCluster), reliable transports etc).

Future protocols could be SOAP-over-TCP, SOAP-over-Jabber, FTP / SMTP / file polling etc.

However we should support any kind of transport using any kind of library - since mostly all a transport does is expose a 'packet' which is just a blob of bytes, a String or a stream.

Marshalling layers

If we then pass data from the transports into a pluggable connector layer which could consist of either

• XMLBeans direct
• JAXB
• StAX, SAX, DOM, Source (TrAX processing)
• JAX-RCP endpoints & Axis handlers
• XStream etc
• custom parsing / marshalling tools

Then we can make a highly scalable & performing SOAP stack using any marshalling code required - without having to pay the DOM price.

Custom endpoints

There are various possible ultimate endpoints, from Axis stuff to POJOs to JWS and the like - these should all drop into one of the marshalling technologies - use the most efficient one for the endpoint technology you wish.

Issues

• we need a simple way to write reuable header processors. I suspect writing StAX based ones is gonna be the best way forwards as it makes writing header-based pipeline processors the easiest. But we should make this pluggable.

• is XMLBeans definitely the fastest stack we can use? XStream is pretty fast though its java centric rather than XSD centric (but maybe thats a good thing