[MOBY-l] String & text-plain

[Gabriel Berriz]

Hi all.

I'm trying to code a toy service that all it does is to echo back 
*verbatim* (through a text-plain object) the raw XML that it received as input.

One thing I have not been able to figure out is the correspondence between 
an object's definition (as given in registerObject) and the raw XML string 
corresponding to this object.  My immediate questions are

1. What exactly is the difference between String and text-plain?

2. It is my understanding that the raw XML representation for the String 
object corresponding to "my favorite string" is something like:

   <String namespace="some/namespace" id="my favorite string"/>

What is the raw XML representation for the text-plain object corresponding 
to "my favorite string"?

The larger question is that from the point of view of someone coding a 
service, how do I know the structure of the XML that my script will receive 
as input?

An even larger concern is that I'm surprised by the amount of XML munging 
that I see in sample BioMOBY code.  I thought the whole point of using SOAP 
modules was to insulate oneself from having to do much (or any) parsing and 
munging of XML.

Gabriel





A far more important question has to do with a client's ability to handle a 
given output from a service.  This output presumably comes back as 
XML.  How does the client figure out how to parse this output to get the 
desired information?  I thought the whole idea was that this should be 
transparent to the client, but