First bump in the SCA investigation

During evalutations and investigations you sometimes come to a point where you hit the wall and finds an issue that leaves a big question mark in your head. Suffice to say I just hit one of those moments...

If you've followed my previous posts you know that I've recently started to look into how the SCA Tuscany runtime and composition model could be utilized for building transport/implementation neutral services at my client.

The existing strategy is based on building webservices with JAX-WS, Java's standard WebService framework. One great feature of any WS framework is the ability to define message interceptors/handlers that will be injected before the message receives the actual service. These handlers have access to the entire soap message, including the soap headers. So you could i.e. define a company-wide custom soapheader with meta-data which should be acted upon by each and every service before (or even after) invocation.

This takes care of non-functional requirements such as traceability, security, end-to-end header propagation etc, since those aspects of the call can be separated from the actual business service.

Looking at the SCA spec and what the tooling provides I have yet to find the similar function in the SCA world. Even if you i.e. expose a component as a webservice binding I cant find any way to specify my chain of handlers that should get invoked for incoming requests.

Looking into the SCA 1.1 specification it states that jax-ws handlers are not included in the standard, but should/could be implemented by vendor implementations. From what I can see IBM has not chosen to do so in the current version of the SCA feature pack runtime nor tooling.

This seems a bit strange to me since I know that the BPM (0.9 SCA) products has had the support for adding handlers to a webservice export for a long time.

I'll definately be going to dig into the subject more, since it could prove to be a big no-go for us as we otherwise would have to revise our entire call-chain strategy for i.e. composite services.

To you readers out there, have you had experiences with interceptors/handlers in the SCA context? I might be missing some obvious features that you know about? If so, I'd be very delightful for all advices you could provide.

Over and out...