Sun has announced the latest releast of the Java Web Services Developer Pack. The Java WSDP 1.5 release contains XML Web Services Security, a preview of the Sun Java Streaming XML Parser based on JSR 173, as well as updates to existing web services technologies previously released in the Java WSDP, and guidelines for developing client side web services.

Read more: Java Web Services Developer Pack 1.5 Available

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For the last 4 months, I'm working with Axis and WSDP. I have realized how important is it to use open source solutions. WSDP do not give useful error message so you are stuck to do what you can with the binary classes to know what’s going on.

To add to the frustration, for every bug I logged on WSDP, Sun lost them!

You should stay away from black boxes and use Axis!

hi,

  I'm toying around with axis for some time and i was able to create simple services. My problem now is that i cant get a comprehensive and reader-friendly reference so that i can build more complex web services. One of my greatest questions with axis is where do i deploy my business codes, the more complex ones? Do i have to link axis with some backend frameworks, if yes can u give ur sample setup that u have worked on?

  By the way the apache axis reference docs are quite complex for me :(

Thanks,
Mike

Hi Mike,

You have to deploy Axis in your app. context, not your app. in Axis context. Add axis libs to your classpath and copy config from web.xml of Axis to your web.xml. So you can share all your business objects and your config through app. context.

For backend frameworks, have a look to the Springframework's docs. There is some tips how to make available Spring context for Axis web-services.

Cheers,
Fuad Ibrahimov.

so spring can be used with axis...ok ill try this one out.

Thanks,
Mike

Mike, I used to use Axis and switched to Hessian, check it out.
.V

Hessian is not using SOAP! People are supposed to use Axis because they want to be compatible with other SOAP implementation. If you don't need SOAP and are sure you will not need it in the futur, DON'T USE it!

Jpetstore in the samples has a good example of using axis.

Also, is it possible to directly use POJOs from my business layer with Axis when using doc/lit with arrays? Presently, I'm converting a generated object like ArrayOfFoo that contains axis Foo objects to a Collection of Foo domain objects by using BeanUtils to copy properties between the objects.

yes, that's correct -- thats how i did it too for some simple web services that i wrote. pretty easy really.

but here's a heads up: i * think * that there may be issues with axis -- at least in terms of interoperability with clients written w/ the vb6 soap toolkit. for example, we got this cryptic error message with axis ws deployed in tomcat 4 on win --

<
    java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: java.lang.ClassCastException@e782a8
>>

bounce the axis app by touching the web.xml and the service works again. that doesn't make obvious sense to me. if anyone has a clue, i'm all ears.

I was wondering if Web Services Security v1.0 with Digital Signatures v1.0 EA2 will allow for implementation of this scenario:

http://tinyurl.com/uf0r

Anyone tried it?