Tutorials : Digging deeper into Apache Axis :

Digging deeper into Apache Axis

by Keld H. Hansen

Introduction

This article is a follow-up to my previous article "Using Apache Axis version 1 to build Web Services". A quick recap: Axis is an Open Source implementation of the SOAP protocol used for building Web Services. In the first article we saw how to install Axis, how to set up various utility bat-files, and how to code, deploy and test the server side code for a simple application used for maintaining a library of DVDs. A Swing client was then coded giving us an application architecture like this:

Figure 1: A Swing client using Axis

The specs for the Swing client were taken from two other articles, "Struts meets Swing (1)" and "Struts meets Swing (2)", where a client was built to interface with a Struts servlet application. Finally in the article we saw how to display the SOAP traffic on the HTTP connection. For this, we used the tcpmon Axis utility.

In this article we’ll investigate some other useful features in Axis:

• session management
• the SOAPMonitor
• automatic generating of client code using the WSDL2Java tool

Then we’ll look into the data type support Axis gives you, and finally we’ll modify the old Struts servlet application so it uses the same web service as the Swing client. The result is therefore this double-client architecture:

Figure 2: Two clients using Axis

The advantage of this architecture is that it is open to other Java clients that can talk SOAP on HTTP.

[Next]

How to Add Java Applets to Your Site

New on the Java Boutique:

New Review:

Time Management Made Easy with the Quartz Enterprise Job Scheduler
Why not just use the Java timer API? This open source scheduling API boasts simplicity, ease-of-integration, a well-rounded feature set, and it's free!

New Applet:

Reverse Complement
Reverse Complement is a simple applet that converts DNA or RNA sequences into three useful formats.

Elsewhere on internet.com:

WebDeveloper Java
Lots of Java information on webdeveloper.com

WDVL Java
Thorough Java resource at the Web Developer's Virtual Library.

ScriptSearch Java
Hundreds of free Java code files to download.

jGuru: Your View of the Java Universe
Customizable portal with online training, FAQs, regular news updates, and tutorials.