Tim West

I found the following articles in Web Services Journal helpful:

http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/48037.htm

http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/46171.htm

http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/48035.htm

(Warning, hype to starboard...avast ye techno-evangelists)


-Tim

This is a standard classpath issue - a required JAR isn't in the classpath.

Axis is hosted as a web application, as a servlet. It therefore needs the servlet JAR.

I'm not at my home computer or I could work out which JAR is missing - but it should be mentioned in the Axis doco - or compare your application with the Axis example apps.


-Tim

That was the way I learned too - initially I didn't know the messy details of XML Schema, WSDL, SOAP etc, but in the end I had to learn them to be able to identify and resolve bugs and problems.

Good luck!



-Tim

Download the WSDL, or get a local copy of it by some means, and run Axis off the local copy. There's no need to use a remote one.

Is this HTTP Basic authentication?


-Tim

I've not yet found a comprehensive site for this...and I have looked! A great article is The History of Web Services, though it's a little out of date. I emailed the author and asked him if he was aware of an updated article or information source and he was not.

As far as learning what standards are hot/popular, it comes down to personal judgement and experience. It's hard to come up with general rules, even. E.g., just because a standard is by the W3C doesn't mean it's generally accepted and will be used. The same goes for consortia like OASIS. For example, OASIS has backed two (sets of) transaction standards (BTP and WS-CAF), but another set (WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction, WS-BusinessActivity), written by IBM, Microsoft and BEA appears to be gaining more ground in terms of useability.

I reckon It's fair to say that the Basic Profile is accepted by everyone. Beyond that, though, it gets tough. WS-Addressing, the Basic Security Profile and the WS-Policy standards appear to be heading for common acceptance, but this is only a hunch of mine.


-Tim

So far as I know, no such survey exists. No vendor will ever do one, because it will either (1) show up their weaknesses, or (2) cover the truth. No industry consortium or consortia-run website will do one for the same reasons - each constituent vendor will protest such a move.

AFAIK, the only way to proceed is by reading each vendor's product specs and, where possible, trying the products out. This is a real pain - and very slow - but I've not yet found a better solution.

The upside to this is that by trying a few different platforms you get to know standards like WSDL really well.


-Tim

OK, you've imported namespace "http://util.java" and associated it with namespace identifier 'tns3'. You've then referred to a type (presumably) defined by that namespace in lines like these:

<element name="enumeration" nillable="true" type="tns3:Enumeration"/> <element name="fieldEnumeration" nillable="true" type="tns3:Enumeration"/>

However, you aren't providing a schema for namespace "http://util.java", so wsdl2java is complaining. AFAIK, you either need to add an xsi:schemalocation, or (and I find this easier with Axis) rewrite the current schema to not refer to an external one.

If you're not familiar with XML schemas, namespaces and the idea of importing schemas, you really need to learn these concepts before you can fix this problem.

By the way, did you write this schema/WSDL yourself, or generate it with a tool?


-Tim

You've referenced a 'thing' (of some type, I can't tell from the error message alone) named 'Enumeration' (in XML Namespace 'http://util.java'), but no definition could be found.

It's probably a type or element in an XML Schema, in which case you either need to import the schema correctly, or add the definition if it's missing.

If you can't work it out, post your schema and perhaps someone can help.


-Tim

That depends entirely upon which salesperson you talk to...and what they're trying to sell you. Some useful articles:

CORBA-biased article on omg.org

A more academic paper on the subject

A good IBM article

--Tim

Yes. The JBoss documentation can. It's extremely unlikely that someone here will write a more comprehensive or detailed description of JBoss Web services than the JBoss documentation itself.

This chapter of the JBoss getting started guide may be of use; the JBoss Wiki was the best source of information I found, overall.

I don't think using Eclipse really impacts how you develop JBoss Web services. That is, I'm not aware of an Eclipse plugin that makes the process any less painful (and I found it very painful).


-Tim

All WS toolkits come with example applications (I think)...so download the toolkit of your choice, and check its documentation.

Apache Axis is a common starting point. Sun's JWSDP comes with extensive samples, as does BEA Weblogic. I imagine other toolkits do too, but my experience is limited to these three.

Note that you don't really get web services example applications without any toolkit because any application depends on a particular kit - a WS toolkit written using Axis will work only with Axis, for example.


-Tim

Y'all can relive those memories with MAME and the appropriate ROMs...hours of fun, without the risk of getting addicted to a current game that takes months to finish


-Tim

WSDL1.1 identifies operations by name only (not message/parameter type) so Java-style method overloading is not possible.

The best you can do, AFAIK, is to allow for a null parameter (i.e., nillable="true") in your XML Schema.


-Tim

What you can do also depends on your WS toolkit.

In general it's much easier to return a Java array (i.e., a MyCustomClass[]) than an ArrayList, since an ArrayList could contain objects of any type.*

I can't help more than this - in Weblogic 8.1, I achieve a similar effect by writing the WSDL and schema first, then generating the Java interface/stubs from these. The Weblogic tools generate methods containing Java arrays rather than ArrayLists.


-Tim

* That is, until Java 5. I've never used Web services with Java 5, so YMMV.
[ August 17, 2005: Message edited by: Tim West ]

Weblogic does not use Axis in any way.

I know this isn't the most useful advice, but can you upgrade to Axis 1.2? 1.0 is very old now, and the issue you're hitting (which looks rather like a bug) may have been resolved.

Finally, my natural tendency is to put the fault on the Axis side - Weblogic 8.1 is the best WS platform I've tried yet. (Note that the fact that the exception was thrown on the Axis side does not mean that the problem originates there. Weblogic could be returning an invalid SOAP message, in which case Axis may fail unexpectedly.)


-Tim