Hi ,
Can, anyone, tell me if it is possible to invoke an axis web service from a browser ?
And, if yes, what is the procedure to do that ?
If you have a recent browser (Moz or IE 6, anyway) supporting XMLHTTP calls, then there's no problem doing it in Javascript. You get your uri, soapAction, and envelope (as a string), say for an amazon keyword search request you'd have "http://soap.amazon.com/onca/soap";, "KeywordSearchRequest", doAmazonKeywordSearchEnvelope(token,keyword) where "token" is your Amazon token and "keyword" is what you're searching for; then you go like so:
var inIE = document.all != null;
var xmlhttp=null;
if(inIE) xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject('MSXML2.XMLHTTP');
else xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
if(!xmlhttp)
return alert("can't initialize xmlhttp object");
if(!inIE)
netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.
enablePrivilege("UniversalBrowserRead");
xmlhttp.open('POST',uri,false);
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("SOAPAction", soapAction)
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml; charset=utf-8")
xmlhttp.send(envelope);
var result=xmlhttp.responseXML;and there you've got it. Mozilla also lets you work at a higher level, but this code does work on both, and an axis service should be no problem as long as you can figure out the envelope. (If necessary, use a Java client and then use tcpmon or whatever to see what's actually being passed, then imitate in Javascript. Crude, but you end up with a light-weight client.) (Comments appreciated)
Tom Myers
