I'm looking at the JAX-RPC DII Call interface.
(This is both in Sun's implementation and the Apache Axis implementation.)
According to the JAX-RPC Specification, version 0.7, PD2, of Feb 1 2002,
section 8.2.4, the Call interface has a method
java.util.Map getOutputParams()
the same method existed in Apache SOAP 2.2, and my code uses it heavily.
Apache Axis has such a method too. In Apache SOAP 2.2 and early versions of
Axis, the returned type was a Vector. Now it's made its way into the
specification, the type has changed to a Map.
The problem is that the contract for Map does not guarantee element ordering,
so that it's not possible to get at the returned parameters in the order
they were sent.
This simply doesn't work - the order of the returned elements is important.
I would like to see the specification modified so that getOutputParams() gives
access to the returned parameters in the order they were sent. In other words,
returning a Vector (or, more generally, a List) of parameters. (Or, some
other mechanism to get at the returned parameters positionally.)
-Peter Tribble
HGMP Computing Services
http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk/~ptribble/