SOAP-DTC: Simple SOAP 1.2 Libraries for Java

SOAP-DTC is a simple and minimalist set of SOAP 1.2 libraries for Java. It is aimed at projects that both require a loose-dynamic binding to SOAP-based web services and that prefer working with SOAP messages as XML document. This is done by using the flexible Dom4J library combined with Jaxen for XPath, and the XPP3 XML pull-parser for efficiency.

SOAP-DTC is released under a liberal MIT-style license. At the moment, SOAP-DTC provides the following libraries.

• soap-dtc-core: the core library which defines a simple Java model for SOAP messages, and provides transportation classes (ex: HTTP). This library can be used on the client-side to invoke web services with a loose binding.
• soap-dtc-server: a library which is useful if you want to create SOAP-based web services with the same philosophy as soap-dtc-core. It provides a Java Servlet that:
  • routes messages to handlers
  • makes sure that mandatory SOAP headers can be handled, else it creates a SOAP exception
  • provides WSDL documents when available
  • can be configured by using a BSF-compliant scripting language such as BeanShell, Jython, Groovy, JRuby, ...

You can download binary and source packages for the libraries, or you can also use Maven2 by adding our repository to your pom.xml. It is all explained in our downloads section.

Most existing SOAP Java frameworks are complicated to use, especially when all you need is to communicate simple SOAP messages. The The SOAP specifications are simple to understand after all, so why should it be that complicated to send XML messages embedded in an XML envelope (the SOAP message envelope)?

• WSDL documents cannot be used for binding (this is deliberate).
• It does not support SOAP 1.0 and SOAP 1.1 (why do the other frameworks stick with 1.1 when 1.2 is way better?).