-k.

I’ve been tooling around writing a SOAP client that meets my needs of being simple to use and easy to work with (which for me means no generated classes). At the same time I decided to take a look into STaX parsing. All is going swimmingly using the reference implementation until I need to get the current namespace context from a start event. It comes back null (according to the documents the worst it should be is empty).

Okay I think, well this is StAX and there are a good number of implementations around. I’ll just grab one of those.

The first place I tried was codehaus as the reference implementation now lives there and probably has an update or two. Yep there’s an update version 1.1.1-dev. Switch jars fire the test up. The 1.1.1-dev implementation dies in the same manner as the 1.0 implementation (null returned from getNamespaceContext()).

Being at codehaus I thought I’d try their other StAX parser Woodstox. As version 2.0 is at release candidate status I thought I’d give it a shot first. Nope, peek() on the reader returns information for the current event (i.e. the one I have just consumed) rather than the next event. I use peek a lot so needless to say my code doesn’t work. Okay, well it is only rc-1 so I forgive them and give version 1.0.6 a shot. Nope, now an earlier test that calls a writer dies with namespace declaration problems. Bum, ah well I’m pretty sure Sun have a shiny new implementation in the updated web services pack.

Okay, download, run shell script, install a bunch of stuff I’m really not interested in. Ah finally. I add the link to sjsxp.jar to my environment and away we go. Nope, nextTag().asStartTag() returns an error indicating that we are not on a tag event (the event is a StartTagEvent object btw). Knowing better than to try and figure out issues in suns j2ee stack (I’ve had to use sun one application server and no amount of logic will help you find the problems), I give up on it.

Now I believe that Oracle and Bea both have StAX implementations though from reading their websites and forums it looks as though they both have requirements based on their deployment environments. So that leaves me in the unfortunate position of not being able to use any of the implementation I’ve tried without issues. For now I’ll ignore the problem (I’ll return the value as a string rather than a QName) and keep an eye out for updates.