Soap and Axis + Installing Axis

What is SOAP?

SOAP is an XML-based communication protocol and encoding format for inter-application communication. Originally conceived by Microsoft and Userland software, it has evolved through several generations; the current spec is version,SOAP 1.2, though version 1.1 is more widespread. The W3C’s XML Protocol working group is in charge of the specification.

SOAP is widely viewed as the backbone to a new generation of cross-platform cross-language distributed computing applications, termed Web Services.

What is Axis?

Axis is essentially a SOAP engine — a framework for constructing SOAP processors such as clients, servers, gateways, etc. The current version of Axis is written in Java, but a C++ implementation of the client side of Axis is being developed.

But Axis isn’t just a SOAP engine — it also includes:

• a simple stand-alone server,
• a server which plugs into servlet engines such as Tomcat,
• extensive support for the Web Service Description Language (WSDL),
• emitter tooling that generates Java classes from WSDL.
• some sample programs, and
• a tool for monitoring TCP/IP packets.

The main purpose where i have used axis is to host web services using WSDL:

• Automatic WSDL generation from deployed services
• WSDL2Java tool for building Java proxies and skeletons from WSDL documents
• Java2WSDL tool for building WSDL from Java classes.

Setting up Axis:

1. In Jboss:
1. Download axis-bin-1_2_1.zip from http://ws.apache.org/axis/
2. Unzip and go to axis-bin-1_2_1\axis-1_2_1\
3. Rename this axis-1_2_1 to axis (optional)
4. Copy axis folder into deploy directory in jboss
cp axis ..\..\jboss\server\default\deploy\

2. In Tomcat:
Follow steps 1-3 above
4. Copy axis folder into Tomcat\webapps