I give up

[Kurt Olsen]

Folks, I hate to say it but I had to ditch axis. Way too difficult. And we won’t be using it in the future.   Our application has approx 30 vendors we communicate with using SOAP. Approx 25 of them are implemented by simply creating strings and firing them off, then parsing out the reply. Primitive but fairly easy to do.   The other 5 used axis. At the moment we’re using the ColdFusion server. When we upgraded to java 5 and coldfusion mx7 our axis based connectors broke. It took approximately 2 weeks to diagnose and ‘solve’ the problem. Axis used commons-logging, and commons-logging broke. That required fairly major surgery to the coldfusion classpath. Pieces of commons-logging we’re coming in off of different classloaders.   So technically speaking, commons-logging broke -  not axis but…..since axis brought the flaw to life, and has given us grief (probably the CF integration)  in the past, it is axis that got the bad reputation due to the fact that it was at the top of the food chain. The two weeks solving this problem wasn’t totally wasted because it exposed a fairly large flaw in the overall architecture.   After getting the existing connectors to work again, I had to turn my attention to the next connector in the pipeline – eBay via Soap…. Only one problem – eBay’s sdk is written against java 1.4 and axis 1.1 – while we upgraded to java 5 and axis 1.2 After another week of trying various ‘workarounds’ etc I was forced to give up and will have to communicate with eBay using the “create strings” technique.   Bottom line is that the overall cost of the ‘SOAP’ system and it’s co-horts in crime is un-managable given our quarterly release cycle. I’m disappointed that after all that effor to modernize – the goal really wasn’t accomplished.   I fully understand the various issues involved, most of which aren’t really axis’s fault but – any way I slice it this entire exercise felt exactly like trying to use the J2EE 1.3/1.4 ejb specifications. Big, confusing, hard to use etc…..And I predict will eventually be abandoned (or at least buried beneath a convienence API).   This is just one co’s experience of course but I submit to you that as you continue your development you might want to consider the overall ‘cost’ that SOAP and it’s tools are exacting on the community. This simply has to get easier because as it stands both the other developers (who watched over my shoulder so to speak) and myself have simply given up on an ‘easy’ tool fix. Our experience is that SOAP is a diaster and costing virtually everyone in corporate programming a lot of money and lost sleep….   Thanks for listening, and please remember that I’m taking the time to write this not to complain (well, maybe a little) but to provide feedback from the field.   Respectfully, Kurt Olsen