SOAP on VMS

[Willem Grooters]

Is anyone using the combination of Apache, Tomcat and Axis to create webservices on OpenVMS?
I have trouble building some of the examples since some javax packages seem to be missing, where they ought to be present.

Willem

[Ian Miller.]

read about Willems fun with web stuff on VMS on this web site http://sysmgr.blogspot.com/

[Chris Barratt]

Hi Willem,

We had a brief play with this over a year or so ago now. My memory of it is minimal, but I believe we got some of the examples working and certainly got a couple of very basic test cases of our own going - eventually.
A big learning curve that we didn't get very far up.
One thing I noted from the installation was that one of the validation tests "start_simple_axis_server" uses by default the port number 8080. This is the same port that Tomcat uses by default, so if you accept the default when running the example, it doesn't work.

I seem to also remember there was quite a good article in one of the Technical Journals, which when I read it I wished I had seen before I started ! Sorry, don't remember which one.

Cheers,
Chris

[Willem Grooters]

@Ian:
I will update it soon :-)
@Chris:
Thanks for the hint, I will look into the journals.

To be more precise on the issue:

The supplied userguide examples all work; classes are with the packages, and once you have JAVA$CLASSPATH set up properly, these can all be built. With the other examples, I have the impression it doesn't always work as you might expect, if at all. (As seems ususal, documentation is minimal, and limited to Windows and Unix. And this package was delevered being "SOAP for VMS").

However, building axis using the standard JAVA method (ant) won't do because a number of packages to be imported is either incomplete or completely missing. Even when JAVA 1.4.2-P2 (J2SE SDK) has been installed.

See attached files for the procedure to set logicals, and the missing files (extracted form the ant output)

Since I do have a .WSDL files, I could create basic Webservice java sources using the (locally built) WSDL2Java class. I've done the client side, a server with and a server without skeletom, following the suer guide. Compiling these doesn't give an error, nor .class files....

[Ian Miller.]

parhaps this one is the journal article referred to.
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/journal/v4/examining_web_services.html

[Willem Grooters]

The article contains some commercial blabla, but it was somewhat helpfull, though it didn't tell much more than the SOAP manuals had told me already. But it did make something clear: The track is right, but rough. Very rough. Do NOt rely on on the SOAP-originated manuals and tools only.

The attachent as stated in the previous message added this time :)

Willem

[Willem Grooters]

An update:

I have managed to find the missing files (Tomcat common library) and was able to fully build AXIS. I also could compile the webapplication, after having changed one file created by the WSDL2Java program, and because of that, a number of other (generated) java sources and the (also generated) deploy.wsdd.
When using the AXIS-suuplied AdminClient program to deploy the service, I don't get any error message but it seems the service is NOT activated in AXIS, where the example services are.
I have copied all required files to the appropiate locations (web-inf.axis.classes) but that didn't help.