WSRP event payloads with "simple" types

[Kevin Frender <kevin.frender@oracle.com>]

Hello all,

For WSRP 2.0 events, the schema-supported event payload types are a 
NamedStringArray and "any" from a non-WSRP-types namespace.  This was a 
conscious decision at the time to not get into the details of 
standardizing event payload encoding.

For JSR286 (Java Portlet specification version 2.0) event payloads can 
have any JAXB-bindable object type, or any of the JAXB primitive types, 
which include very basic things like java.lang.String, java.util.Date, 
etc. which have obvious mappings to XML data types.  The JAXB primitive 
types don't have @XmlRootElement annotations however, so they can't be 
marshalled directly (by themselves) to XML.

So if a portlet wanted to send an event with a simple String payload, 
JSR286 allows that, but there is no obvious way to represent that in XML 
as a WSRP event payload in a manner that other WSRP containers could 
recognize.

In the interest of interoperability, I was wondering how everyone 
handles the binding of these "primitive" types when they are used as an 
event payload.  We were thinking of creating a simple XML element for 
holding these types inside the event payload, but that wouldn't work too 
well for WSRP interoperability, unless the WSRP committee came up with a 
standard schema and XML namespace to hold these "simple" types.  So as a 
second question, I was wondering if there was interest in creating a 
standard WSRP extension for handling these simple data types.

Thanks,

  Kevin