Sams Teach Yourself J2EE™ in 21 Days

Parameter Types and Type Mapping

So far, the Web Services you have seen have used simple parameters, such as strings and integers. However, in the real world, most systems will need to pass complex types such as arrays, classes, and data structures. During the rest of today, you will look at how such complex types can be mapped between Java and SOAP/WSDL and create an order service that uses these types.

Mapping Between Java and SOAP/WSDL Types

For simple types, SOAP and WSDL use the representations defined in “XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes” that is part of the W3C XML Schema standard. There is a straight mapping for all Java primitive types except for char. There is also a straight mapping for the Java String class.

If you were to define a Web ...