What is the difference between Document style and RPC style communication?

Question

Can somebody explain to me the differences between Document and RPC style webservices? Apart from JAX-RPC, the next version is JAX-WS, which supports both Document and RPC s

Answer 1

I think what you are asking is the difference between RPC Literal, Document Literal and Document Wrapped SOAP web services.

Note that Document web services are delineated into literal and wrapped as well and they are different - one of the primary difference is that the latter is BP 1.1 compliant and the former is not.

Also, in Document Literal the operation to be invoked is not specified in terms of its name whereas in Wrapped, it is. This, I think, is a significant difference in terms of easily figuring out the operation name that the request is for.

In terms of RPC literal versus Document Wrapped, the Document Wrapped request can be easily vetted / validated against the schema in the WSDL - one big advantage.

I would suggest using Document Wrapped as the web service type of choice due to its advantages.

SOAP on HTTP is the SOAP protocol bound to HTTP as the carrier. SOAP could be over SMTP or XXX as well. SOAP provides a way of interaction between entities (client and servers, for example) and both entities can marshal operation arguments / return values as per the semantics of the protocol.

If you were using XML over HTTP (and you can), it is simply understood to be XML payload on HTTP request / response. You would need to provide the framework to marshal / unmarshal, error handling and so on.

A detailed tutorial with examples of WSDL and code with emphasis on Java: SOAP and JAX-WS, RPC versus Document Web Services