Apache AXIS Experience

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First steps

Installation

During the project definition a question about a convenient Web-Service toolkit occured. The decision has been met to use Apache Axis. In the time of project implementation Apache Axis 1.1 has reached a stable state. Axis 1.2 was avaliable as a Beta-Release from Apache CVS. The installation of both versions were trivial. It is detailed described in the readme-File.

Running samples

The most Apache Axis samples, delivered together with the distributeion were running as written in the readme. Some of them didn't work at all. (e.g. Proxy-Sample)

Writing own applications

Web services

The project implementations needs several Web Services to be built. First, the sample scenario Web Services has been implemented using Axis 1.1. This was a straight-forward implementation. The usage of Axis for the Web Service endpoints described in the WS-C and WS-BA specifications were not convenient using the Axis built-in serializer/deserializer.

Due to the modular structure of Apache Axis I used Castor 0.956 for the XML-to-Java mapping as described in the article on developerWorks ( see Links ). Some difficulties occured during the setup of this symbiose, so the Apache Axis 1.2 has been obtained from the apache CVS and rebuild with Clover as de-/serializer.

Note

During the build we noticed, that there were some problems with having Clover on your Classpath. If you did, Clover has been tightly bound in Axis libraries and was needed for runtime execution.

Handler

For more excited control on the message processing it is usefull to implement own handlers. There are samples in AXIS documentation describing how to do it.

Note

The usage of handlers had the following effect of running in JBoss: the dynamic (in-runtime) undeployment or redeployment of handler in JBoss is impossible and makes the JBoss restarts neccessary. The re-/undeployment works in standalone Tomcat.

Problems

The main problem of Axis usage was the leak of sufficient documentation at the time of the project creation. The only usefull documentation sources could be found on IBM and Apache AXIS homepages.