Re: Book for Axis

[xu cai]

thanks derek, I am also thinking about port a service from Axis 1.4 to 2.0, now I would rather wait for a while. 

 

On 8/3/06, Derek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

In my opinion, the 1.0 release was so unstable that it should have been termed a beta. Extremely commonly used features simply did not work, or did not work reliably, or had a design that was not yet stable enough to be worth writing code for. The current nightly builds are starting to become moderately stable. However, documentation (updated user guide, etc.) for the changes made in these builds has lagged the development effort for quite a bit, making it difficult to actually figure out how to use the new features.

 

I have been trying for weeks to port a web service that worked fine on Axis 1.4 to Axis 2. I have not yet succeeded. I have hit a lot of bugs, including quite a few I consider "serious" which made basic, commonly needed features unusable. Many have been fixed, but a number of crucial ones have not yet been fixed. (Yes, I have entered these in JIRA).

 

Documentation of how to use Axis2 is spotty, with many important areas entirely omitted from the user documentation. Some infrequently used areas are covered in great depth, but more commonly needed areas (Fault handling, HTTP chunking, accessing SOAP headers, invocation of WSDL2Java from ANT, etc.) are omitted entirely, and hence the mailing list tends to discuss these topics quite frequently. Also, some of the existing documentation is no longer entirely correct, due to design changes.

 

Reading the mailing list, I am still seeing a lot of people complaining about NullPointerExceptions and similar other low-level exceptions (OMException, etc.) being thrown from various tools or from generated code. This just shouldn't happen on a regular basis. These sorts of problems should be exceedingly rare, but instead they seem to be quite common. They seem particularly common when feeding invalid or unsupported input to tools -- the tools fail to properly detect that the input is invalid, and simply crash instead of issuing a useful error message.

 

I would say that Axis2 is fairly immature at this point. It has a lot of nice features, and the code I wrote using it is FAR more elegant, smaller, and easier to understand than the corresponding code for Axis 1.4. However, my experience has been that there are a lot of "rough edges" in Axis2, and a single one of those can stop you cold for a week or more while you try to figure out what is going on. At the moment, my project is entirely on hold waiting for some of the bugs I have filed to be fixed.

 

To their credit, the people on this mailing list have been quite helpful. Also, a number of the bugs that I filed were fixed within a week (or even a few days) of having been submitted. It is clear that Axis2 is improving rapidly.

 

Still, I would hesitate to base a major project on Axis2 at its current stage of code maturity unless you are prepared to devote significant time to identifying and fixing bugs in Axis2 itself.

 

Derek

-----Original Message-----
From: sudip shrestha [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]

Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2006 12:52 PM
To: axis-user@ws.apache.org
Subject: Re: Book for Axis

Wondering if Axis 2 is production ready or if not when we should expect it to be production ready?

On 8/2/06, José Ferreiro < [EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:

hello Sudip,

I am also new to web services and I bought this book:

http://agileskills2.org/DWSAA/

I am interested in WSS4J security.
As I am a beginner I don't know if this is a good book or not.
I start it and it is not too bad.

It explains Eclipse, Axis 1.3 and WSS4J!

Hope this helps. I am starting soon also with a project about web services.
However I think I will use Axis 1.4 (obviously Axis 2 is another way).

Some comments from someone between Axis 1.x and Axis2 will be appreciated.

Thank you.

José

On 8/2/06, sudip shrestha < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Hi,
What is a good reference book for Apache Axis?  Need to start diggin into Web Services....  I am new to web services, should I jump into Axis 2, (not studyin Axis 2)....?
 

--
José Ferreiro
EPFL Communication Systems engineer
ing.sys.com.dipl.EPFL

Phone: +41 (0)79 644 98 25 [+41 (0)76 526 55 55]

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- xucai