Hello - I'm evaluating the Spring Web Services for use in a high-volume, response-time sensitive application, and I have a couple questions that I was hoping to get answered...

Concern #1 - The API is very payload-centric. My problem is that we are dealing with an industry-standard WSDL that has known gaps. The third parties that we are dealing with have chosen to address these gaps by adding non-standard request attributes to the SOAP header. This precludes us from using the various payload endpoints unless we declare them as "request" scope and inject the soap header values via an interceptor. Our other (cleaner) alternative is to write our own MessageEndpoint so that we can gain access to the whole soap message. If we do the latter, what do we give up? What are the risks?

Concern #2 - The soap message is managed internally via SAAJ, but the various payload endpoints typically transform the message into a different form (e.g., DOM4J, JDOM, etc.). What are the repercussions oof this additional transform (vs. me writing a servlet and parsing straight into DOM4J for example)?

Thanks in advance for any information/corrections you might be able to provide me on these concerns.