Hello,
      I am a developer working on a J2EE product that can be deployed on any standard J2EE app server like Weblogic, Websphere etc.
I have developed some web services functionality and have a question on deploying it.

In development, I used apache axis to develop the web service.
There are a couple of options that I can think of for deployment:
1. Make the Axis engine part of our web application and make the web service run under the axis container even though the application might be deployed on any application server.

2. Manually deploy the web services on each application server, using that application server's web services capabilities. In this case , axis goes out of the picture.

I would be grateful if anyone who has been on this same track guides me on which of the 2 is more feasible . An entirely different option is also welcome.


Regards,
Anand

I would go with option 1, personally. Not all J2EE servers comply with the JAX-RPC standard yet, so your Web Service code probably won't be portable. If you use Axis, you can be sure that you write and deploy the same services on all servers.

Hi Paul,

Just a query on yr reply.

>Not all J2EE servers comply with the JAX-RPC standard yet, so your Web Service >code probably won't be portable. If you use Axis, you can be sure that you write >and deploy the same services on all servers.
 
If thats the case then Axis itself is JAX-RPC compliant, and if JAX-RPC is not a standard on complying with others server then how does that help in building webs services using Axis.
I have mostly worked with Apache-Axis at this stage.

Yr input wil be invaluable here.
Vishal.

JAX-RPC is not (yet) fully portable, but Axis is. Axis is written as a J2EE 1.2 compliant web application, and can be installed on any J2EE compliant servlet (Tomcat 3.2+, Websphere 4+, Weblogic 6+). Therefore, although your web service itself may not be portable between different SOAP servers, your web service engine (Axis) will be.

Furthermore, eventually most (if not all) Java SOAP servers will comply with the JAX-RPC standard, and you will have the option of moving away from Axis and into other environments.

Thanks paul.

I faced issues when deploying webservice as described by #1 in WAS5.0.2. Any call to AxisEngine from within my webservice would throw an exception. Also i am not sure how/where to provide the axis handler information when using websphere. Did anyone use axis with a finaly deployment in WAS?