OpenSAML user discussion

[Jay Packard <>]

Chad La Joie wrote:
> Jay Packard wrote:
> > According to 
> > http://svn.middleware.georgetown.edu/view/java-xmltooling/branches/1.0sig/src/org/opensaml/xml/io/Marshaller.java?revision=118&view=markup&pathrev=126, 
> > the marshall and unmarshall methods are not static.  Don't I have to 
> > use a marshalling/unmarshalling factory?
>
> Again, here is the documentation on unmarshalling
> https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/OpenSAML/OSTwoUserManual
>
> And here is the documentation on marshalling:
> https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/OpenSAML/OSTwoUsrManJavaWriteToXML
Is the source I found out of date?  The examples from your links don't 
disagree.  They also use a marshalling/unmarshalling factory rather than 
a static function.
> > Also, the marshaller returns an org.w3c.dom.Element object.  Can I 
> > simply cast this to an java.io.Serializable class (which is returned 
> > by the method in my port type stub)?
>
> This is an incredibly basic Java question and not appropriate for this 
> list.  If you need to know if Element is serializable go look at the 
> Javadoc for it.
What makes you think I hadn't looked at the Javadocs?  I did and saw 
that Element is an interface so it is not serializable.  So my question 
was more rhetorical.  However, I looked at the ResponseType stub class 
returned by my XACMLAuthorizationPortType stub class, and saw that it 
does implement java.io.Serializable, so this answers my question. 

Without asking it directly, I was really just trying to understand from 
your experience the way the Element object is typically returned in a 
web service, not for you to explain something basic like the way casting 
works.