Re: I give up
Nathanial does not speak for the Axis community. Please continue to provide advice. Please don't give up on Axis. Thanks, AnneOn 10/31/05, Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Nathaniel G. Auvil wrote: Can we please stop this thread?Fine. If you don't want advice I won't waste my time. [...] Bottom line is...if you can not figure the project out, dont use it. Pay Microsoft, BEA, IBM, or whoever, tons of money for their product, support, and documentation.For some companies that is the way to go.For others, it is not.Very good. I will advise my project that we should not wait for Axis to mature, even to the point of being usefully documented.We shall have to findsomething else. --- Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Three suggestions for improving the Axis experience: 1. More effort to documentation. The Axis 1 documents aren't yet sufficient to deal with use in a real project. Just expanding some of the Javadoc comments would help. In fact, providing or expanding the package.html files would be good, and maybe more palatable than reworking the xdocs. :) If someone did want to work on the xdocs, the reference guide to WSDD would be a good place to start. 2. Improve the error reports. Currently, when Axis goes worng (more commonly, when it is misconfigured) the error reporting isn't sufficient to diagnose the problem. Alternatively, provide tools that can inspect the configuration of a deployed service and explain what's wrong. 3. Provide an alternative to the current WSDL2Java to write stubs that use an external seralizer/deserializer mechanism (Castor, XMLbeans, JAXB). In my experience with Axis, the stubs are the valuable part and the Axis XML-mapping is redundant (duplicates mapping code we already have) unstable (bean classes incompatible between Axis versions) and fragile. Hence the move to XMLBeans in Axis 2, I guess...but maybe Axis 1 could be cleaned up too? What I have in mind is a stub-generation tool that takes a WSDL contract, a Java interface defining the API of the stub and a file of class/element mappings. It would generate stubs for which the API is entirely defined by the author of the client, and which can be rebuild to the same contract in the next version of Axis 1; WSDL2Java can't provide this stability of interface. You could provide a separate tool for creating data-binding beans if one were needed. This could generate the beans that WSDL2Java currently produces. It would also need to generate the class/element mapping-file. Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of AstronomyTel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HAFax: +44-1223-337523 __ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED]Institute of AstronomyTel: +44-1223-337542Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HAFax: +44-1223-337523
RE: I give up
Three suggestions for improving the Axis experience: 1. More effort to documentation. The Axis 1 documents aren't yet sufficient to deal with use in a real project. Just expanding some of the Javadoc comments would help. In fact, providing or expanding the package.html files would be good, and maybe more palatable than reworking the xdocs. :) If someone did want to work on the xdocs, the reference guide to WSDD would be a good place to start. 2. Improve the error reports. Currently, when Axis goes worng (more commonly, when it is misconfigured) the error reporting isn't sufficient to diagnose the problem. Alternatively, provide tools that can inspect the configuration of a deployed service and explain what's wrong. 3. Provide an alternative to the current WSDL2Java to write stubs that use an external seralizer/deserializer mechanism (Castor, XMLbeans, JAXB). In my experience with Axis, the stubs are the valuable part and the Axis XML-mapping is redundant (duplicates mapping code we already have) unstable (bean classes incompatible between Axis versions) and fragile. Hence the move to XMLBeans in Axis 2, I guess...but maybe Axis 1 could be cleaned up too? What I have in mind is a stub-generation tool that takes a WSDL contract, a Java interface defining the API of the stub and a file of class/element mappings. It would generate stubs for which the API is entirely defined by the author of the client, and which can be rebuild to the same contract in the next version of Axis 1; WSDL2Java can't provide this stability of interface. You could provide a separate tool for creating data-binding beans if one were needed. This could generate the beans that WSDL2Java currently produces. It would also need to generate the class/element mapping-file. Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523
RE: I give up
Bob, Just an analogue to OpenVMS standards: User programs - nothing particular - developed on 6.0 (Alpha) will run under 8.2 (Alpha) WITHOUT change, compilation or link. Only if the images are linked against the operating system itself because they use (documented) system internals directly, they need at least to be relinked; sometimes recompilation is required, and in rare cases, code needs to be changed. Between minor releases (7.3-1 = 7.3-2 for example) NO CHANGE at all is required (unless you use undocumented fetaures or interfaces: not recommended and totally unsupported, so it's your own responsibility. This is generally accepted) If a Java version changes (1.4 - 1.5) the VM changes. That _may_ cause problems. I would expect it to happen if the java code links into the VM itself, and than it would be acceptable. However, most java code will not and so I would expect it to run without any extra activity. Therefore, if an application, developed in Java 1.4.1 does not run in the java 1.5 VM, AND the application does nothing VM-internal, it SHOULD run under 1.5. Some applications do, some don't, or might not (so the original VM is supplied just because to be sure the application runs). So Tomcat runs on both 1.4 and 1.5 without change? Good. I wish there were more application that behaved that way It may be that the language changes - but that would always be extending the previous standard, and older code should still compile without changes. be it as a separate path within the compiler, but it should be accepted; that a waring or informational message is given is no problem. By the way: this is definietvely not specific for java - I have seen other environments where code breaks occur, even worse. As for new versions of tools: A new configuration in a new version is a pain - there can be good reasons, but it's a pain nevertheless. The job of the maintainer of a PRODUCTION environment would be eased tremendously if there was some kind of compatibility mode, or a tool to do the basic translation. Often, a new configuration imples a new terminology; worse: the same name meaning something else. Confusion is a killer in these matters. Probably there would be extensive explanations and yes, release notes should be read in advance, and implications of the new version should clearly and completely be mentioned. But here again: only between major reeases. Tomcat 5 in completely new so I accept it. The same for application that rely on the tools: it should be clear - extensively - what the implications would be, and as much translation tools as possible should be delivered as well, or extensive documentation. Here, I do agree that writing documentation is something completely different that writing programs. There's quite a lot that comes together: knowledge of the application (or tools), knowledge of the intended audience and what they nmeed to knwo - and in what depth. It's a skill in itself, and it should NOT be left to the developer him/herself. He/She should have the ATTITUDE to write documentation as (less appreciated) part of the job. The extent depends on teh target audience: if your collegues on the job are the main users, it can be more technical, you will eb able to explain on-the-job. If your product spreads around the world, beyond your control, there is more elaborate documentation required. But again: it's the developer's attitude mostly. Where companies that supply commercial software, documentation is part of the product. Of course these companies can afford a staff of writers to do the job - and do it right. Of course, in a non-commercial or low-budget environment, you cannot. Of course the documentation suffers in both quality and quantity, opening markets for writers and editors to fill in. The amount of documentation grows large - and is so divers that it is virtually impossible to find the RIGHT documentation for YOUR problem. The same applies to the community help. I had help with my issues because they were rather basic. But I can fully subscribe - by experience in others - that one small question can be ansewered by tons of answers, far too many to handle. There may be the right, most approipate answer, but you can only tell after having read all of them. Apart from the tons of messages you are NOT interested in. Nice to use a mail client that allows you use automated rules, filtering messages into a separate location. But that is daling with symptoms, not the cause. Willem -Oorspronkelijk bericht- Van: Bob Bateman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Verzonden: vrijdag 28 oktober 2005 18:48 Aan: axis-user@ws.apache.org Onderwerp: Re: I give up On Fri, 28 Oct 2005 09:48:26 +0200 Willem Grooters [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Another important issue that I read in Kurt's complaints, is the incompatibility of different Java versions. I too have seen this. However, I have to say that the incompatibility wasn't as much with Java as it was with the tool. For example
RE: I give up
On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Nathaniel G. Auvil wrote: Can we please stop this thread? Fine. If you don't want advice I won't waste my time. [...] Bottom line is...if you can not figure the project out, dont use it. Pay Microsoft, BEA, IBM, or whoever, tons of money for their product, support, and documentation. For some companies that is the way to go. For others, it is not. Very good. I will advise my project that we should not wait for Axis to mature, even to the point of being usefully documented. We shall have to find something else. --- Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Three suggestions for improving the Axis experience: 1. More effort to documentation. The Axis 1 documents aren't yet sufficient to deal with use in a real project. Just expanding some of the Javadoc comments would help. In fact, providing or expanding the package.html files would be good, and maybe more palatable than reworking the xdocs. :) If someone did want to work on the xdocs, the reference guide to WSDD would be a good place to start. 2. Improve the error reports. Currently, when Axis goes worng (more commonly, when it is misconfigured) the error reporting isn't sufficient to diagnose the problem. Alternatively, provide tools that can inspect the configuration of a deployed service and explain what's wrong. 3. Provide an alternative to the current WSDL2Java to write stubs that use an external seralizer/deserializer mechanism (Castor, XMLbeans, JAXB). In my experience with Axis, the stubs are the valuable part and the Axis XML-mapping is redundant (duplicates mapping code we already have) unstable (bean classes incompatible between Axis versions) and fragile. Hence the move to XMLBeans in Axis 2, I guess...but maybe Axis 1 could be cleaned up too? What I have in mind is a stub-generation tool that takes a WSDL contract, a Java interface defining the API of the stub and a file of class/element mappings. It would generate stubs for which the API is entirely defined by the author of the client, and which can be rebuild to the same contract in the next version of Axis 1; WSDL2Java can't provide this stability of interface. You could provide a separate tool for creating data-binding beans if one were needed. This could generate the beans that WSDL2Java currently produces. It would also need to generate the class/element mapping-file. Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523 __ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523
Re: I give up
Guy Rixon wrote: On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Nathaniel G. Auvil wrote: Can we please stop this thread? Fine. If you don't want advice I won't waste my time. As a (mostly) external observer to all this I would point out that regarding all criticisms as unhelpful and non constructive unless they come with source code, patches and man hours of effort is foolish. Most users of axis have no time to enhance it directly, but users are also far and away the most valuable asset the project has. Axis is not without its flaws but my experience has been that the active developers have been happy to engage with me to help me work around them or figure out where improvements can be made even though I don't have the resources to contribute directly myself. Please don't give up on the project, the person suggesting stopping this thread does not speak for everyone involved; an accurate and reasoned explanation of a problem is, if not welcome (no one likes hearing when their code doesn't work!) then at least appreciated as helpful feedback even without any corresponding solution. Regards, Tom
Re: I give up
Please don't do that -- dims On 10/31/05, Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Nathaniel G. Auvil wrote: Can we please stop this thread? Fine. If you don't want advice I won't waste my time. [...] Bottom line is...if you can not figure the project out, dont use it. Pay Microsoft, BEA, IBM, or whoever, tons of money for their product, support, and documentation. For some companies that is the way to go. For others, it is not. Very good. I will advise my project that we should not wait for Axis to mature, even to the point of being usefully documented. We shall have to find something else. --- Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Three suggestions for improving the Axis experience: 1. More effort to documentation. The Axis 1 documents aren't yet sufficient to deal with use in a real project. Just expanding some of the Javadoc comments would help. In fact, providing or expanding the package.html files would be good, and maybe more palatable than reworking the xdocs. :) If someone did want to work on the xdocs, the reference guide to WSDD would be a good place to start. 2. Improve the error reports. Currently, when Axis goes worng (more commonly, when it is misconfigured) the error reporting isn't sufficient to diagnose the problem. Alternatively, provide tools that can inspect the configuration of a deployed service and explain what's wrong. 3. Provide an alternative to the current WSDL2Java to write stubs that use an external seralizer/deserializer mechanism (Castor, XMLbeans, JAXB). In my experience with Axis, the stubs are the valuable part and the Axis XML-mapping is redundant (duplicates mapping code we already have) unstable (bean classes incompatible between Axis versions) and fragile. Hence the move to XMLBeans in Axis 2, I guess...but maybe Axis 1 could be cleaned up too? What I have in mind is a stub-generation tool that takes a WSDL contract, a Java interface defining the API of the stub and a file of class/element mappings. It would generate stubs for which the API is entirely defined by the author of the client, and which can be rebuild to the same contract in the next version of Axis 1; WSDL2Java can't provide this stability of interface. You could provide a separate tool for creating data-binding beans if one were needed. This could generate the beans that WSDL2Java currently produces. It would also need to generate the class/element mapping-file. Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523 __ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523 -- Davanum Srinivas : http://wso2.com/blogs/
Re: I give up
Guy, Could you please file a JIRA enchancement request for #3 as it is action-able? #1 and #2 will have to be on-going effort. thanks, dims On 10/31/05, Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Three suggestions for improving the Axis experience: 1. More effort to documentation. The Axis 1 documents aren't yet sufficient to deal with use in a real project. Just expanding some of the Javadoc comments would help. In fact, providing or expanding the package.html files would be good, and maybe more palatable than reworking the xdocs. :) If someone did want to work on the xdocs, the reference guide to WSDD would be a good place to start. 2. Improve the error reports. Currently, when Axis goes worng (more commonly, when it is misconfigured) the error reporting isn't sufficient to diagnose the problem. Alternatively, provide tools that can inspect the configuration of a deployed service and explain what's wrong. 3. Provide an alternative to the current WSDL2Java to write stubs that use an external seralizer/deserializer mechanism (Castor, XMLbeans, JAXB). In my experience with Axis, the stubs are the valuable part and the Axis XML-mapping is redundant (duplicates mapping code we already have) unstable (bean classes incompatible between Axis versions) and fragile. Hence the move to XMLBeans in Axis 2, I guess...but maybe Axis 1 could be cleaned up too? What I have in mind is a stub-generation tool that takes a WSDL contract, a Java interface defining the API of the stub and a file of class/element mappings. It would generate stubs for which the API is entirely defined by the author of the client, and which can be rebuild to the same contract in the next version of Axis 1; WSDL2Java can't provide this stability of interface. You could provide a separate tool for creating data-binding beans if one were needed. This could generate the beans that WSDL2Java currently produces. It would also need to generate the class/element mapping-file. Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523 -- Davanum Srinivas : http://wso2.com/blogs/
RE: I give up (let's change the subject line, but try to be constructive)
: Monday, October 31, 2005 3:22 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up Three suggestions for improving the Axis experience: 1. More effort to documentation. The Axis 1 documents aren't yet sufficient to deal with use in a real project. Just expanding some of the Javadoc comments would help. In fact, providing or expanding the package.html files would be good, and maybe more palatable than reworking the xdocs. :) If someone did want to work on the xdocs, the reference guide to WSDD would be a good place to start. 2. Improve the error reports. Currently, when Axis goes worng (more commonly, when it is misconfigured) the error reporting isn't sufficient to diagnose the problem. Alternatively, provide tools that can inspect the configuration of a deployed service and explain what's wrong. 3. Provide an alternative to the current WSDL2Java to write stubs that use an external seralizer/deserializer mechanism (Castor, XMLbeans, JAXB). In my experience with Axis, the stubs are the valuable part and the Axis XML-mapping is redundant (duplicates mapping code we already have) unstable (bean classes incompatible between Axis versions) and fragile. Hence the move to XMLBeans in Axis 2, I guess...but maybe Axis 1 could be cleaned up too? What I have in mind is a stub-generation tool that takes a WSDL contract, a Java interface defining the API of the stub and a file of class/element mappings. It would generate stubs for which the API is entirely defined by the author of the client, and which can be rebuild to the same contract in the next version of Axis 1; WSDL2Java can't provide this stability of interface. You could provide a separate tool for creating data-binding beans if one were needed. This could generate the beans that WSDL2Java currently produces. It would also need to generate the class/element mapping-file. Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523
Re: I give up
On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Davanum Srinivas wrote: Guy, Could you please file a JIRA enchancement request for #3 as it is action-able? #1 and #2 will have to be on-going effort. OK, will do. I'd be glad to help with the documentation but usually I don't have the insight to add anything useful. If I find any specific places to improve error reporting then I'll submit patches. thanks, dims On 10/31/05, Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Three suggestions for improving the Axis experience: 1. More effort to documentation. The Axis 1 documents aren't yet sufficient to deal with use in a real project. Just expanding some of the Javadoc comments would help. In fact, providing or expanding the package.html files would be good, and maybe more palatable than reworking the xdocs. :) If someone did want to work on the xdocs, the reference guide to WSDD would be a good place to start. 2. Improve the error reports. Currently, when Axis goes worng (more commonly, when it is misconfigured) the error reporting isn't sufficient to diagnose the problem. Alternatively, provide tools that can inspect the configuration of a deployed service and explain what's wrong. 3. Provide an alternative to the current WSDL2Java to write stubs that use an external seralizer/deserializer mechanism (Castor, XMLbeans, JAXB). In my experience with Axis, the stubs are the valuable part and the Axis XML-mapping is redundant (duplicates mapping code we already have) unstable (bean classes incompatible between Axis versions) and fragile. Hence the move to XMLBeans in Axis 2, I guess...but maybe Axis 1 could be cleaned up too? What I have in mind is a stub-generation tool that takes a WSDL contract, a Java interface defining the API of the stub and a file of class/element mappings. It would generate stubs for which the API is entirely defined by the author of the client, and which can be rebuild to the same contract in the next version of Axis 1; WSDL2Java can't provide this stability of interface. You could provide a separate tool for creating data-binding beans if one were needed. This could generate the beans that WSDL2Java currently produces. It would also need to generate the class/element mapping-file. Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523 -- Davanum Srinivas : http://wso2.com/blogs/ Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523
RE: I give up (serialization independence)
While I have to solve the same problem, I'm not so sure that the proposed approach is a solution that would work for me. I have looked into doing this independently. That is, I would define my own interfaces to insure that my consumers in my company coded to it and that I would ensure they did not change. I think that it would be reasonable to do this with non complex schemas. However, if you start to multiply the number of schemas by the depth and number of types that might be consumed by the children and grandchildren of these generated objects - maintaining that interface for me would end up being an incredible time synch. For me, I just as soon standardize on my serialization technology along with its java object generation. And look towards an integration to my serialization technology of choice to be provided by Axis. Even if some of it needs to be handcarved, I expect it to be a lot less complex than maintaining a whole set of interfaces that I would need to maintain to bridge my objects to Axis. I guess what I'm saying is that I would probably not consider this approach to solve my problem. -Original Message- From: Guy Rixon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 12:32 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Davanum Srinivas wrote: Guy, Could you please file a JIRA enchancement request for #3 as it is action-able? #1 and #2 will have to be on-going effort. OK, will do. I'd be glad to help with the documentation but usually I don't have the insight to add anything useful. If I find any specific places to improve error reporting then I'll submit patches. thanks, dims On 10/31/05, Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Three suggestions for improving the Axis experience: 1. More effort to documentation. The Axis 1 documents aren't yet sufficient to deal with use in a real project. Just expanding some of the Javadoc comments would help. In fact, providing or expanding the package.html files would be good, and maybe more palatable than reworking the xdocs. :) If someone did want to work on the xdocs, the reference guide to WSDD would be a good place to start. 2. Improve the error reports. Currently, when Axis goes worng (more commonly, when it is misconfigured) the error reporting isn't sufficient to diagnose the problem. Alternatively, provide tools that can inspect the configuration of a deployed service and explain what's wrong. 3. Provide an alternative to the current WSDL2Java to write stubs that use an external seralizer/deserializer mechanism (Castor, XMLbeans, JAXB). In my experience with Axis, the stubs are the valuable part and the Axis XML-mapping is redundant (duplicates mapping code we already have) unstable (bean classes incompatible between Axis versions) and fragile. Hence the move to XMLBeans in Axis 2, I guess...but maybe Axis 1 could be cleaned up too? What I have in mind is a stub-generation tool that takes a WSDL contract, a Java interface defining the API of the stub and a file of class/element mappings. It would generate stubs for which the API is entirely defined by the author of the client, and which can be rebuild to the same contract in the next version of Axis 1; WSDL2Java can't provide this stability of interface. You could provide a separate tool for creating data-binding beans if one were needed. This could generate the beans that WSDL2Java currently produces. It would also need to generate the class/element mapping-file. Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523 -- Davanum Srinivas : http://wso2.com/blogs/ Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523
RE: I give up (let's change the subject line, but try to be constructive)
... My only salvation here is serialization independence. Because with independence, I can even roll my own. Then when/if Axis 2 supports my chosen serialization objects I can trash my home grown solution, use Axis 2, and there are no bumps in the road. so I couldn't agree more with Guy's #3 point below.. A -Original Message- From: Guy Rixon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 3:22 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up Three suggestions for improving the Axis experience: 1. More effort to documentation. The Axis 1 documents aren't yet sufficient to deal with use in a real project. Just expanding some of the Javadoc comments would help. In fact, providing or expanding the package.html files would be good, and maybe more palatable than reworking the xdocs. :) If someone did want to work on the xdocs, the reference guide to WSDD would be a good place to start. 2. Improve the error reports. Currently, when Axis goes worng (more commonly, when it is misconfigured) the error reporting isn't sufficient to diagnose the problem. Alternatively, provide tools that can inspect the configuration of a deployed service and explain what's wrong. 3. Provide an alternative to the current WSDL2Java to write stubs that use an external seralizer/deserializer mechanism (Castor, XMLbeans, JAXB). In my experience with Axis, the stubs are the valuable part and the Axis XML-mapping is redundant (duplicates mapping code we already have) unstable (bean classes incompatible between Axis versions) and fragile. Hence the move to XMLBeans in Axis 2, I guess...but maybe Axis 1 could be cleaned up too? What I have in mind is a stub-generation tool that takes a WSDL contract, a Java interface defining the API of the stub and a file of class/element mappings. It would generate stubs for which the API is entirely defined by the author of the client, and which can be rebuild to the same contract in the next version of Axis 1; WSDL2Java can't provide this stability of interface. You could provide a separate tool for creating data-binding beans if one were needed. This could generate the beans that WSDL2Java currently produces. It would also need to generate the class/element mapping-file. Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of AstronomyTel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HAFax: +44-1223-337523 __ Start your day with Yahoo! - Make it your home page! http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
RE: I give up (let's change the subject line, but try to be constructive)
If you found a way to use classes generated by XMLBeans in Axis Client/Server, I would certainly be interested in and very much appreciate anything you could send me. And anything needed to ensure the client generated stubs work as well. -Original Message- From: Nathaniel G. Auvil [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 12:57 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up (let's change the subject line, but try to be constructive) We are using XMLBeans with Axis. I found a serializer and deserializer on a website some time ago. I can email them to you if you would like. I had to add a custom ant task to modify the server-config.wsdd to change to the XMLBeans serializer but it was no big deal. --- Paul Grillo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Let me be more specific about the 2 areas that have troubled me since I was second in line of kicking off this long thread. I provide this as input and food for thought. As I mentioned previously, I have no axe to grind. I'm fairly well aware of tradeoffs with open source and no open source. We spend tons of money on oracle and bea support, such as it is. There are no guarantees of help when you need it whether you pay for it or not. I also would never blame or take Axis or any product like that to task for the fact that WS_Profile and SOAP is a pain. It is a pain - but it has strong advantages. REST, for example, is a good solution for some problems. REST assured, however, that it could not possibly solve the problem I had to solve which was to communicate with a .NET vendor and swap SOAP messages of which certain elements were signed and encrypted and depended on ws-addressing etc. AXIS 1.2/WSS4J solved this problem for me very nicely, and I thank them. I guess I would say I'm not giving up, I may (hope to) return. But I've got to solve a few of my own issues. Okay, the 2 areas I would like to zero in on 1) AXIS 1 or AXIS2? 2 different projects? any Migration? Have I been left to solve it for myself? The move from Axis 1 to Axis 2 and the way it feels is a little disconcerting. It seems to me (and has been pointed out) that most energy is going into Axis2. Fine, but most deployments have and are running in Axis 1. What bothers me is the feeling that I get that Axis2 is the replacement, and yet there doesn't seem to be any easy migration. If you look at the migration blurb in Axis 2, it spends time telling me why Axis2 is better, but not how to migrate. It almost leaves me with this feeling that I made a mistake going with Axis 1. I ask myself are these the same developes? Axis 1 and 2? Are they competing? So I'm left with the feeling that I'm getting little help on Axis 1 because the efforts are toward Axis 2. And when I read Axis 2 doc, all I'm hearing is it is so much better than Axis 1. It's tough to swallow since I'm sitting on at least one deployment of Axis 1. Am I now being told that I made a mistake? support is dwindling? move to Axis 2? Make all the appropriate changes? This plays into the overall uneasiness. You look for a commitment from the producers/developers to the users. Migration tools for version to version. Make sure users have not been left hanging. Believe me it makes you think twice when you choose any technology, open source or not. I've been through this sort of thing with products that I've spent a lot of money on. I've worked with open source projects that were absolutely committed to the users from version to version with respect to backwards compatibility. 2) Please let me decide what technology I use for serialization/deserialization, not the Web Services Framework. I am in total agreement with Guy's # 3 suggestion attached below. Then next issue is Serialization independence. I really need serialization independence. It cannot be chosen or generated for me by the actual Web Services Framework I chooose, but should use mine. My job within my company is to provide basic services to a number of development teams, each of which provide solutions in a totally different domain. I provide them with interfaces that enable our back office services in any number of ways. These groups don't even really know if or what network is involved. In the context of Web Services, these groups only interface will be related to the generated WSDL/XSD Objects. Given a request object they will gather the info from that object, call upon legacy systems or whatever is needed to fulfill the request, then populate the response object. I will provide my own internal service factory from which I can call upon these back office services and speak the language of our XSD/Schema objects. To them, they are java objects, pure and simple. What this means is these objects must not change. Translated, we need to settle on a stable XSD schema and most importantly a stable set of generated java objects. so
RE: I give up
I concur. Good suggestions all. Kurt Olsen | Software Engineer| EzRez Software, Inc. 3465 Waialae Avenue, Suite 200 | Honolulu | HI | 96816 p 808-735-9260 x 238 | f 808-748-0488 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | www.ezrez.com This message may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient (or authorized to receive for the recipient) and received this message in error; any use, distribution or disclosure is strictly prohibited. Please contact the sender by reply email and delete all copies of this message from your computer system. The views and opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of EzRez Software, except when the sender expressly and with authority states them to be so. -Original Message- From: Guy Rixon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2005 10:22 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up Three suggestions for improving the Axis experience: 1. More effort to documentation. The Axis 1 documents aren't yet sufficient to deal with use in a real project. Just expanding some of the Javadoc comments would help. In fact, providing or expanding the package.html files would be good, and maybe more palatable than reworking the xdocs. :) If someone did want to work on the xdocs, the reference guide to WSDD would be a good place to start. 2. Improve the error reports. Currently, when Axis goes worng (more commonly, when it is misconfigured) the error reporting isn't sufficient to diagnose the problem. Alternatively, provide tools that can inspect the configuration of a deployed service and explain what's wrong. 3. Provide an alternative to the current WSDL2Java to write stubs that use an external seralizer/deserializer mechanism (Castor, XMLbeans, JAXB). In my experience with Axis, the stubs are the valuable part and the Axis XML-mapping is redundant (duplicates mapping code we already have) unstable (bean classes incompatible between Axis versions) and fragile. Hence the move to XMLBeans in Axis 2, I guess...but maybe Axis 1 could be cleaned up too? What I have in mind is a stub-generation tool that takes a WSDL contract, a Java interface defining the API of the stub and a file of class/element mappings. It would generate stubs for which the API is entirely defined by the author of the client, and which can be rebuild to the same contract in the next version of Axis 1; WSDL2Java can't provide this stability of interface. You could provide a separate tool for creating data-binding beans if one were needed. This could generate the beans that WSDL2Java currently produces. It would also need to generate the class/element mapping-file. Guy Rixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Institute of Astronomy Tel: +44-1223-337542 Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA Fax: +44-1223-337523
Re: XMLBeans with Axis (was RE: I give up)
here is the war i found which contains the code. http://superflaco.com/Beehive/java1dot4XBeanSample.war --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wasn't the original poster, but I would love to know how to do this. Any chance you'd put some information on a wiki page for Axis? Or even post it to the newsgroup, maybe someone else could format it for the wiki. Thanks much-- Meghan _ Meghan Pietila Java Middleware Architect Sales Service Management Program US Bank Gold 4 (651) 205-0904 (651) 271-2815 cell [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nathaniel G. Auvil To: axis-user@ws.apache.org nathaniel_auvil@cc: yahoo.com Subject: RE: I give up (let's change the subject line, but try to be constructive) 10/31/2005 11:56 AM Please respond to axis-user We are using XMLBeans with Axis. I found a serializer and deserializer on a website some time ago. I can email them to you if you would like. I had to add a custom ant task to modify the server-config.wsdd to change to the XMLBeans serializer but it was no big deal. --- Paul Grillo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Let me be more specific about the 2 areas that have troubled me since I was second in line of kicking off this long thread. I provide this as input and food for thought. As I mentioned previously, I have no axe to grind. I'm fairly well aware of tradeoffs with open source and no open source. We spend tons of money on oracle and bea support, such as it is. There are no guarantees of help when you need it whether you pay for it or not. I also would never blame or take Axis or any product like that to task for the fact that WS_Profile and SOAP is a pain. It is a pain - but it has strong advantages. REST, for example, is a good solution for some problems. REST assured, however, that it could not possibly solve the problem I had to solve which was to communicate with a .NET vendor and swap SOAP messages of which certain elements were signed and encrypted and depended on ws-addressing etc. AXIS 1.2/WSS4J solved this problem for me very nicely, and I thank them. I guess I would say I'm not giving up, I may (hope to) return. But I've got to solve a few of my own issues. Okay, the 2 areas I would like to zero in on 1) AXIS 1 or AXIS2? 2 different projects? any Migration? Have I been left to solve it for myself? The move from Axis 1 to Axis 2 and the way it feels is a little disconcerting. It seems to me (and has been pointed out) that most energy is going into Axis2. Fine, but most deployments have and are running in Axis 1. What bothers me is the feeling that I get that Axis2 is the replacement, and yet there doesn't seem to be any easy migration. If you look at the migration blurb in Axis 2, it spends time telling me why Axis2 is better, but not how to migrate. It almost leaves me with this feeling that I made a mistake going with Axis 1. I ask myself are these the same developes? Axis 1 and 2? Are they competing? So I'm left with the feeling that I'm getting little help on Axis 1 because the efforts are toward Axis 2. And when I read Axis 2 doc, all I'm hearing is it is so much better than Axis 1. It's tough to swallow since I'm sitting on at least one deployment of Axis 1. Am I now being told that I made a mistake? support is dwindling? move to Axis 2? Make all the appropriate changes? This plays into the overall uneasiness. You look for a commitment from
RE: I give up
Certainly don't throw-in-the-towel on axis. Developers, just keep in mind that the axis users end up with the decisive vote as to how well axis 'worked'. You have to program with your voters in mind. We are just one co. fighting our own set of battles. We are disappointed we couldn't use axis during this transitional phase in java. So as not to fan the flames this will be my last 'thought on the matter' - I kindly thank all of the axis contributors for their time and effort - We'll be back I'm sure. I re-iterate - the inability of a co. to use axis for its intended purpose is a non-trivial event. Think about it, do what you can to keep it from happening to another co. Good luck, have fun, thanks for listening. Kurt Kurt Olsen | Software Engineer| EzRez Software, Inc. 3465 Waialae Avenue, Suite 200 | Honolulu | HI | 96816 p 808-735-9260 x 238 | f 808-748-0488 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | www.ezrez.com This message may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient (or authorized to receive for the recipient) and received this message in error; any use, distribution or disclosure is strictly prohibited. Please contact the sender by reply email and delete all copies of this message from your computer system. The views and opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of EzRez Software, except when the sender expressly and with authority states them to be so. -Original Message- From: Ayers, Sam [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 6:24 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up I agree. No single e-mail participant represents the entire list. But everyone is free to speak their mind - this includes folks who have feedback and folks who would like to see a particular discussion thread end :-) All that being said, my personal opinion is that it is a mistake to throw in the towel regarding use of axis. A better approach is to understand its present deficiencies and limitations, and to help the community improve it over time. Regards, Sam -Original Message- From: Tom Oinn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 11:05 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up Guy Rixon wrote: On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Nathaniel G. Auvil wrote: Can we please stop this thread? Fine. If you don't want advice I won't waste my time. As a (mostly) external observer to all this I would point out that regarding all criticisms as unhelpful and non constructive unless they come with source code, patches and man hours of effort is foolish. Most users of axis have no time to enhance it directly, but users are also far and away the most valuable asset the project has. Axis is not without its flaws but my experience has been that the active developers have been happy to engage with me to help me work around them or figure out where improvements can be made even though I don't have the resources to contribute directly myself. Please don't give up on the project, the person suggesting stopping this thread does not speak for everyone involved; an accurate and reasoned explanation of a problem is, if not welcome (no one likes hearing when their code doesn't work!) then at least appreciated as helpful feedback even without any corresponding solution. Regards, Tom Learn more about Chase Paymentech Solutions,LLC payment processing services at www.paymentech.com THIS MESSAGE IS CONFIDENTIAL. This e-mail message and any attachments are proprietary and confidential information intended only for the use of the recipient(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not print, distribute, or copy this message or any attachments. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender by return e-mail and delete this message and any attachments from your computer. ..
RE: I give up
5 links - to start with - and you must access each of them to find out what is the most appropiate solution. Nice, if you have time (and money) on your side. But in normal day development practice, you're normally bound to budgets, both financially and time, so I can understand that people turn away from the product. I can understand that people have no confidence. Willem -Oorspronkelijk bericht- Van: Davanum Srinivas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Verzonden: vrijdag 28 oktober 2005 16:41 Aan: axis-user@ws.apache.org CC: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Onderwerp: Re: I give up I don't have confidence that when and if I run into future problems I can find the resources or help to get around problems. http://wso2.com/ http://covalent.net/ http://www.spikesource.com/ http://www.sourcelabs.com/ http://www.allesta.com/ -- dims On 10/28/05, Paul Grillo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain. We used Axis 1.2 to deploy a single SOAP service that was required of us by one of our major partners that dictated a .NET interface complete with SOAP element signature, timestamp, and encryption. I will say that we got this working very nicely. I am appreciative of the work. I will say that my interactions with the WSS4J folks was extremely helpful, and I thank them very much. So, that is a great success and I thank everybody that contributed. Now as I look to go a little more mainstream within the rest of our products at our company, I began taking a closer look at Axis, including java data binding dependencies which are critical because of the various products our company produces that will need to adhere to the bound XSD Objects. I need to insure that I have some independence when choosing this piece of the puzzle. I have looked at AXIS and AXIS2. I have had a few questions related to this. My major frustration is as my inability to get answers to what I thought were fairly simple questions. Perhaps they are either not simple, or thought as stupid. I'm not talking just about zeroing in on a bug and submitting it to JIRA, I'm talking about some input about even whether something is doable, not just how. Now before anybody comes down on me, I am fully aware of where my expectations should be vis a vis open source software, mailing lists, etc. I do not feel that I am owed anything when using this software. I have found, however, a little more help in other areas when using open source. I have, in fact, solved a myriad of problems on my own within Axis. I find myself in the bowels of the code trying to figure out what it's doing etc, so to solve my own problems. I do, however, have to factor in the time spent to research and solve these issues. I have posted several questions and generally do not even get a response, or an I don't know, though I suppose the lack of a response is an I don't know. So, it's gotten to the point where I don't bother. In terms of Axis, I feel that I need to go in another direction simply because of my inability to get a straight answer around data binding support (for example) now or in the future in Axis or in Axis2. I have asked what I believe is a simple question, whether a particular class that seems like it should be thread safe is so (just another example). Generally speaking if somebody asked me about most any class I've designed and built as to whether it was designed that way, I could come up with an answer. Yet, no answer. Yes, yes, if a class is not advertised as Threadsafe, consider that it isn't. Lack of documentation, however, doesn't confirm the default assumption. But my bigger concern is the unknown. I don't have confidence that when and if I run into future problems I can find the resources or help to get around problems. Perhaps my expectations are much too high. Of other products that we use and have had very good success is Hibernate, Castor, WSS4J (as mentioned above). I just don't get a comfortable feeling when working with Axis ... Okay, I'm big enough for somebody to tell me to not let the door hit me in the you know where as I leave. Again, I'm not angry, I'm not even largely disappointed. I've just been forced to make a decision based on what is... Perhaps in awhile I'll return to see what's up with Axis2. -paul -Original Message- From: Davanum Srinivas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 11:07 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up Kurt, Looking at your postings, i don't see much from you in terms of engaging the user or developer community to ask for help. http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devw=2r=1s=olsenq=b http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-userw=2r=1s=olsenq=b Your specific email to Tom (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112801670512125w=2)...i have no clue how to help. i did reply back to a prev mail on that thread (http
RE: I give up
Grooters OpenVMS developer system Manager -Oorspronkelijk bericht- Van: Davanum Srinivas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Verzonden: vrijdag 28 oktober 2005 5:07 Aan: axis-user@ws.apache.org CC: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Onderwerp: Re: I give up Kurt, Looking at your postings, i don't see much from you in terms of engaging the user or developer community to ask for help. http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devw=2r=1s=olsenq=b http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-userw=2r=1s=olsenq=b Your specific email to Tom (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112801670512125w=2)...i have no clue how to help. i did reply back to a prev mail on that thread (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112692662128194w=2) If you have a problem with Macromedia or eBay folks, We can't really help. If you have a problem with latest releases of Axis, we can help if you add JIRA bugs (and chase us!) on the axis-dev@ list. If you need production/development support, there are avenues for that as well. Am sorry you had a bad experience, thanks for the feedback. -- dims On 10/27/05, Kurt Olsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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 -- Davanum Srinivas : http://wso2.com/blogs/ Disclaimer: The information contained in this E-mail and its attachments is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom it is addressed and others authorized to receive it. If you are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution or taking any action in reliance of the contents of this E-mail and any attachments is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. The CIP or ISC is neither liable for the proper and complete transmission of the information contained in this E-mail and any attachments nor for any delay in its receipt. If received in error, please contact The CIP or ISC on +31(0)522 72 quoting the name of the sender and the addressee and then delete it from your system. Please note that the The CIP or ISC does not accept any responsibility for viruses and it is your responsibility to scan the E-mail and attachments (if any
RE: I give up
I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain. We used Axis 1.2 to deploy a single SOAP service that was required of us by one of our major partners that dictated a .NET interface complete with SOAP element signature, timestamp, and encryption. I will say that we got this working very nicely. I am appreciative of the work. I will say that my interactions with the WSS4J folks was extremely helpful, and I thank them very much. So, that is a great success and I thank everybody that contributed. Now as I look to go a little more mainstream within the rest of our products at our company, I began taking a closer look at Axis, including java data binding dependencies which are critical because of the various products our company produces that will need to adhere to the bound XSD Objects. I need to insure that I have some independence when choosing this piece of the puzzle. I have looked at AXIS and AXIS2. I have had a few questions related to this. My major frustration is as my inability to get answers to what I thought were fairly simple questions. Perhaps they are either not simple, or thought as stupid. I'm not talking just about zeroing in on a bug and submitting it to JIRA, I'm talking about some input about even whether something is doable, not just how. Now before anybody comes down on me, I am fully aware of where my expectations should be vis a vis open source software, mailing lists, etc. I do not feel that I am owed anything when using this software. I have found, however, a little more help in other areas when using open source. I have, in fact, solved a myriad of problems on my own within Axis. I find myself in the bowels of the code trying to figure out what it's doing etc, so to solve my own problems. I do, however, have to factor in the time spent to research and solve these issues. I have posted several questions and generally do not even get a response, or an I don't know, though I suppose the lack of a response is an I don't know. So, it's gotten to the point where I don't bother. In terms of Axis, I feel that I need to go in another direction simply because of my inability to get a straight answer around data binding support (for example) now or in the future in Axis or in Axis2. I have asked what I believe is a simple question, whether a particular class that seems like it should be thread safe is so (just another example). Generally speaking if somebody asked me about most any class I've designed and built as to whether it was designed that way, I could come up with an answer. Yet, no answer. Yes, yes, if a class is not advertised as Threadsafe, consider that it isn't. Lack of documentation, however, doesn't confirm the default assumption. But my bigger concern is the unknown. I don't have confidence that when and if I run into future problems I can find the resources or help to get around problems. Perhaps my expectations are much too high. Of other products that we use and have had very good success is Hibernate, Castor, WSS4J (as mentioned above). I just don't get a comfortable feeling when working with Axis ... Okay, I'm big enough for somebody to tell me to not let the door hit me in the you know where as I leave. Again, I'm not angry, I'm not even largely disappointed. I've just been forced to make a decision based on what is... Perhaps in awhile I'll return to see what's up with Axis2. -paul -Original Message- From: Davanum Srinivas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 11:07 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up Kurt, Looking at your postings, i don't see much from you in terms of engaging the user or developer community to ask for help. http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devw=2r=1s=olsenq=b http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-userw=2r=1s=olsenq=b Your specific email to Tom (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112801670512125w=2)...i have no clue how to help. i did reply back to a prev mail on that thread (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112692662128194w=2) If you have a problem with Macromedia or eBay folks, We can't really help. If you have a problem with latest releases of Axis, we can help if you add JIRA bugs (and chase us!) on the axis-dev@ list. If you need production/development support, there are avenues for that as well. Am sorry you had a bad experience, thanks for the feedback. -- dims On 10/27/05, Kurt Olsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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
Re: I give up
I don't have confidence that when and if I run into future problems I can find the resources or help to get around problems. http://wso2.com/ http://covalent.net/ http://www.spikesource.com/ http://www.sourcelabs.com/ http://www.allesta.com/ -- dims On 10/28/05, Paul Grillo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain. We used Axis 1.2 to deploy a single SOAP service that was required of us by one of our major partners that dictated a .NET interface complete with SOAP element signature, timestamp, and encryption. I will say that we got this working very nicely. I am appreciative of the work. I will say that my interactions with the WSS4J folks was extremely helpful, and I thank them very much. So, that is a great success and I thank everybody that contributed. Now as I look to go a little more mainstream within the rest of our products at our company, I began taking a closer look at Axis, including java data binding dependencies which are critical because of the various products our company produces that will need to adhere to the bound XSD Objects. I need to insure that I have some independence when choosing this piece of the puzzle. I have looked at AXIS and AXIS2. I have had a few questions related to this. My major frustration is as my inability to get answers to what I thought were fairly simple questions. Perhaps they are either not simple, or thought as stupid. I'm not talking just about zeroing in on a bug and submitting it to JIRA, I'm talking about some input about even whether something is doable, not just how. Now before anybody comes down on me, I am fully aware of where my expectations should be vis a vis open source software, mailing lists, etc. I do not feel that I am owed anything when using this software. I have found, however, a little more help in other areas when using open source. I have, in fact, solved a myriad of problems on my own within Axis. I find myself in the bowels of the code trying to figure out what it's doing etc, so to solve my own problems. I do, however, have to factor in the time spent to research and solve these issues. I have posted several questions and generally do not even get a response, or an I don't know, though I suppose the lack of a response is an I don't know. So, it's gotten to the point where I don't bother. In terms of Axis, I feel that I need to go in another direction simply because of my inability to get a straight answer around data binding support (for example) now or in the future in Axis or in Axis2. I have asked what I believe is a simple question, whether a particular class that seems like it should be thread safe is so (just another example). Generally speaking if somebody asked me about most any class I've designed and built as to whether it was designed that way, I could come up with an answer. Yet, no answer. Yes, yes, if a class is not advertised as Threadsafe, consider that it isn't. Lack of documentation, however, doesn't confirm the default assumption. But my bigger concern is the unknown. I don't have confidence that when and if I run into future problems I can find the resources or help to get around problems. Perhaps my expectations are much too high. Of other products that we use and have had very good success is Hibernate, Castor, WSS4J (as mentioned above). I just don't get a comfortable feeling when working with Axis ... Okay, I'm big enough for somebody to tell me to not let the door hit me in the you know where as I leave. Again, I'm not angry, I'm not even largely disappointed. I've just been forced to make a decision based on what is... Perhaps in awhile I'll return to see what's up with Axis2. -paul -Original Message- From: Davanum Srinivas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 11:07 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up Kurt, Looking at your postings, i don't see much from you in terms of engaging the user or developer community to ask for help. http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devw=2r=1s=olsenq=b http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-userw=2r=1s=olsenq=b Your specific email to Tom (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112801670512125w=2)...i have no clue how to help. i did reply back to a prev mail on that thread (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112692662128194w=2) If you have a problem with Macromedia or eBay folks, We can't really help. If you have a problem with latest releases of Axis, we can help if you add JIRA bugs (and chase us!) on the axis-dev@ list. If you need production/development support, there are avenues for that as well. Am sorry you had a bad experience, thanks for the feedback. -- dims On 10/27/05, Kurt Olsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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
RE: I give up
I must say that I'm also extremely disappointed with Axis and this usergroup. I didn't like the fact that you have to sign up to receive ALL emails in order to participate -- I've never seen this before. So because I was in a jam and needed and answer, I joined and asked my question. I posted the question 5 times in different forms over a 3 week period and didn't get one response -- nothing. So I then tried to unsubscribe and it didn't work. I followed the instructions in the auto-reply given for troubleshooting unsubscribes and that didn't work. So I emailed the administrator (his email was in the autoreply, but of course nowhere to be found on the axis site) and got a reply about 3 days later telling me that the reason that my unsubscribe didn't work was because my email address was not on the list. So I responded assuring him that I am still on the list and am getting hundreds of messages a week (to my work email mind you) and I added a copy of the email header of one of the list emails I received with my email return path etc. -- I got no response. Also since the sender in the list emails is not axis-user@ws.apache.org but instead the individual senders address, I can't even mark them as spam to filter them (not a very smart setup, not to mention the privacy issues). This is becoming a real nuisance and it appears that I have no recourse. I've tried emailing the general Apache help and got no response, and of course there is not a single phone number on the either the apache or axis web sites. This is bush league support. No wonder so many people prefer to use Microsoft products. Maybe not all of their solutions are optimal (although I'm not sure how true this is anymore) but everything is much easier to implement, and interconnect with different technologies under the Microsoft umbrella. And when you have a problem, the support sites available are much superior -- I've never posted an issue about a microsoft product where I didn't have it solved within a day or two. The open source concept is great when you're a student and can't afford to fork over a grand or two for software, but when you use it for business apps and factor in the time to implement and the extra tens of thousands of dollars in man hours per year to fix bugs, Microsoft is a much cheaper solution. I would be extremely grateful to anyone to can tell me how to get off of this list. Thank you. Cheers, Jeff. -Original Message- From: Paul Grillo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 10:15 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain. We used Axis 1.2 to deploy a single SOAP service that was required of us by one of our major partners that dictated a .NET interface complete with SOAP element signature, timestamp, and encryption. I will say that we got this working very nicely. I am appreciative of the work. I will say that my interactions with the WSS4J folks was extremely helpful, and I thank them very much. So, that is a great success and I thank everybody that contributed. Now as I look to go a little more mainstream within the rest of our products at our company, I began taking a closer look at Axis, including java data binding dependencies which are critical because of the various products our company produces that will need to adhere to the bound XSD Objects. I need to insure that I have some independence when choosing this piece of the puzzle. I have looked at AXIS and AXIS2. I have had a few questions related to this. My major frustration is as my inability to get answers to what I thought were fairly simple questions. Perhaps they are either not simple, or thought as stupid. I'm not talking just about zeroing in on a bug and submitting it to JIRA, I'm talking about some input about even whether something is doable, not just how. Now before anybody comes down on me, I am fully aware of where my expectations should be vis a vis open source software, mailing lists, etc. I do not feel that I am owed anything when using this software. I have found, however, a little more help in other areas when using open source. I have, in fact, solved a myriad of problems on my own within Axis. I find myself in the bowels of the code trying to figure out what it's doing etc, so to solve my own problems. I do, however, have to factor in the time spent to research and solve these issues. I have posted several questions and generally do not even get a response, or an I don't know, though I suppose the lack of a response is an I don't know. So, it's gotten to the point where I don't bother. In terms of Axis, I feel that I need to go in another direction simply because of my inability to get a straight answer around data binding support (for example) now or in the future in Axis or in Axis2. I have asked what I believe is a simple question, whether a particular class
Re: I give up
I've un-subbed your email ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- dims On 10/28/05, McPhail, Jeff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I must say that I'm also extremely disappointed with Axis and this usergroup. I didn't like the fact that you have to sign up to receive ALL emails in order to participate -- I've never seen this before. So because I was in a jam and needed and answer, I joined and asked my question. I posted the question 5 times in different forms over a 3 week period and didn't get one response -- nothing. So I then tried to unsubscribe and it didn't work. I followed the instructions in the auto-reply given for troubleshooting unsubscribes and that didn't work. So I emailed the administrator (his email was in the autoreply, but of course nowhere to be found on the axis site) and got a reply about 3 days later telling me that the reason that my unsubscribe didn't work was because my email address was not on the list. So I responded assuring him that I am still on the list and am getting hundreds of messages a week (to my work email mind you) and I added a copy of the email header of one of the list emails I received with my email return path etc. -- I got no response. Also since the sender in the list emails is not axis-user@ws.apache.org but instead the individual senders address, I can't even mark them as spam to filter them (not a very smart setup, not to mention the privacy issues). This is becoming a real nuisance and it appears that I have no recourse. I've tried emailing the general Apache help and got no response, and of course there is not a single phone number on the either the apache or axis web sites. This is bush league support. No wonder so many people prefer to use Microsoft products. Maybe not all of their solutions are optimal (although I'm not sure how true this is anymore) but everything is much easier to implement, and interconnect with different technologies under the Microsoft umbrella. And when you have a problem, the support sites available are much superior -- I've never posted an issue about a microsoft product where I didn't have it solved within a day or two. The open source concept is great when you're a student and can't afford to fork over a grand or two for software, but when you use it for business apps and factor in the time to implement and the extra tens of thousands of dollars in man hours per year to fix bugs, Microsoft is a much cheaper solution. I would be extremely grateful to anyone to can tell me how to get off of this list. Thank you. Cheers, Jeff. -Original Message- From: Paul Grillo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 10:15 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain. We used Axis 1.2 to deploy a single SOAP service that was required of us by one of our major partners that dictated a .NET interface complete with SOAP element signature, timestamp, and encryption. I will say that we got this working very nicely. I am appreciative of the work. I will say that my interactions with the WSS4J folks was extremely helpful, and I thank them very much. So, that is a great success and I thank everybody that contributed. Now as I look to go a little more mainstream within the rest of our products at our company, I began taking a closer look at Axis, including java data binding dependencies which are critical because of the various products our company produces that will need to adhere to the bound XSD Objects. I need to insure that I have some independence when choosing this piece of the puzzle. I have looked at AXIS and AXIS2. I have had a few questions related to this. My major frustration is as my inability to get answers to what I thought were fairly simple questions. Perhaps they are either not simple, or thought as stupid. I'm not talking just about zeroing in on a bug and submitting it to JIRA, I'm talking about some input about even whether something is doable, not just how. Now before anybody comes down on me, I am fully aware of where my expectations should be vis a vis open source software, mailing lists, etc. I do not feel that I am owed anything when using this software. I have found, however, a little more help in other areas when using open source. I have, in fact, solved a myriad of problems on my own within Axis. I find myself in the bowels of the code trying to figure out what it's doing etc, so to solve my own problems. I do, however, have to factor in the time spent to research and solve these issues. I have posted several questions and generally do not even get a response, or an I don't know, though I suppose the lack of a response is an I don't know. So, it's gotten to the point where I don't bother. In terms of Axis, I feel that I need to go in another direction simply because of my inability to get
RE: I give up
Hi Jeff, I know just the feeling you have about the tons of mails. What I have done (I use Outlook 2002) is to set a rule to move all messages containing the string axis-user@ws.apache.org into a different folder and that seems to work quite well. Regards, Chetan -Original Message- From: McPhail, Jeff [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 11:55 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up I must say that I'm also extremely disappointed with Axis and this usergroup. I didn't like the fact that you have to sign up to receive ALL emails in order to participate -- I've never seen this before. So because I was in a jam and needed and answer, I joined and asked my question. I posted the question 5 times in different forms over a 3 week period and didn't get one response -- nothing. So I then tried to unsubscribe and it didn't work. I followed the instructions in the auto-reply given for troubleshooting unsubscribes and that didn't work. So I emailed the administrator (his email was in the autoreply, but of course nowhere to be found on the axis site) and got a reply about 3 days later telling me that the reason that my unsubscribe didn't work was because my email address was not on the list. So I responded assuring him that I am still on the list and am getting hundreds of messages a week (to my work email mind you) and I added a copy of the email header of one of the list emails I received with my email return path etc. -- I got no response. Also since the sender in the list emails is not axis-user@ws.apache.org but instead the individual senders address, I can't even mark them as spam to filter them (not a very smart setup, not to mention the privacy issues). This is becoming a real nuisance and it appears that I have no recourse. I've tried emailing the general Apache help and got no response, and of course there is not a single phone number on the either the apache or axis web sites. This is bush league support. No wonder so many people prefer to use Microsoft products. Maybe not all of their solutions are optimal (although I'm not sure how true this is anymore) but everything is much easier to implement, and interconnect with different technologies under the Microsoft umbrella. And when you have a problem, the support sites available are much superior -- I've never posted an issue about a microsoft product where I didn't have it solved within a day or two. The open source concept is great when you're a student and can't afford to fork over a grand or two for software, but when you use it for business apps and factor in the time to implement and the extra tens of thousands of dollars in man hours per year to fix bugs, Microsoft is a much cheaper solution. I would be extremely grateful to anyone to can tell me how to get off of this list. Thank you. Cheers, Jeff. -Original Message- From: Paul Grillo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 10:15 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain. We used Axis 1.2 to deploy a single SOAP service that was required of us by one of our major partners that dictated a .NET interface complete with SOAP element signature, timestamp, and encryption. I will say that we got this working very nicely. I am appreciative of the work. I will say that my interactions with the WSS4J folks was extremely helpful, and I thank them very much. So, that is a great success and I thank everybody that contributed. Now as I look to go a little more mainstream within the rest of our products at our company, I began taking a closer look at Axis, including java data binding dependencies which are critical because of the various products our company produces that will need to adhere to the bound XSD Objects. I need to insure that I have some independence when choosing this piece of the puzzle. I have looked at AXIS and AXIS2. I have had a few questions related to this. My major frustration is as my inability to get answers to what I thought were fairly simple questions. Perhaps they are either not simple, or thought as stupid. I'm not talking just about zeroing in on a bug and submitting it to JIRA, I'm talking about some input about even whether something is doable, not just how. Now before anybody comes down on me, I am fully aware of where my expectations should be vis a vis open source software, mailing lists, etc. I do not feel that I am owed anything when using this software. I have found, however, a little more help in other areas when using open source. I have, in fact, solved a myriad of problems on my own within Axis. I find myself in the bowels of the code trying to figure out what it's doing etc, so to solve my own problems. I do, however, have to factor in the time spent to research and solve these issues. I have posted several questions
Re: I give up
On Fri, 28 Oct 2005 09:48:26 +0200 Willem Grooters [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Another important issue that I read in Kurt's complaints, is the incompatibility of different Java versions. I too have seen this. However, I have to say that the incompatibility wasn't as much with Java as it was with the tool. For example, Tomcat 4 and Tomcat 5 are different animals. Both run on Java 1.4 and 1.5. However, each has a different way of configuring the server and the application that you deploy. This IS the nature of the tool - and is NOT unique to Open-Source. I find myself, at times, using the generic term Java to mean the tools as well as the language. However, my use of Java to refer to the tools and applications I use and make is INCORRECT. Tomcat is NOT Java. Nor is Axis Java or SOAP. They are tools. In reading Kurt's comments, I fear he is using the term Java to refer to many things, not just the language or the VM. And this is unfair. Java 1.5 WILL run every application I write in Java 1.4 (sans bugs in the compiler implementation or the JVM of course...) But Tomcat 5 will NOT run a Tomcat 4 web application - nor should it. The folks that write the many applications that we rely upon go to great lengths to try to tell us what has changed when they release a version of their software. These patch notes and release readme's are an important part of every piece of software - whether it's FOSS or proprietary. Documenation is another thing. If it exists (and alone that is already a problem) it should be clear and consistent. It often isn't: It's full of jargon, too much omission of knowledge, therefore hard to understand for newcomers, and asking the community is not always a help: it takes too much time to filter what's usable and what's not, and to give things a try and find out why it doesn't work; It's a good way of asking more specific things, not the basic ones. But you NEED to if documenation is simply missing. Documentation is a problem in EVERY project, whether it's FOSS or proprietary. When was the last time you looked at the books on the shelf at your local book store? How many Java books are there? And much of that content describes the same concepts and content over and over. Creating documentation for a newbie to a project is the most difficult thing to accomplish. Why? Just because I'm a newbie to AXIS and SOAP doesn't mean I'm a newbie to Java, Tomcat, Web Services, etc. So the question that each author needs to ask is: where do I start? And the answer to that question is usually the focus of the book/documentation. You may notice from this reply e-mail, that I can write fairly well (although not perfectly...) I've attempted to write documentation and to provide additional information to existing material. And I can tell you from first hand experience that writing docs is the most thankless of jobs - especially when I'm doing it for free! Why is it that there are so many books and publications in existance today? People who write well want to get compensated for their efforts - as they should. Look at any hardware or software vendor. They have *teams* of paid writers that produce their materials. We in the FOSS community are so blessed it isn't funny. We have access to the best documentation that can ever exist for a project: the source. But, having said that, I can say with 100% confidence that I can't follow 99% of the source of the Axis project. It's not that I'm stupid, or that the author of the code I'm looking at is so much smarter than I am (although I'm sure that's true!) My problem is putting into context the code I'm looking at in relation to the problem/task I'm attempting to solve. And no matter how well the code is documented, it's never enough. Another problem all products have with their documentation is you must almost be an expert with the tool before you can really write the documentation. Because who knows the tool better than the expert that created it? And writing documentation is not something most developers like to do. Bob
Re: I give up
I will agree that on this mailing list, so far, the few questions that I have asked have gone unresponded to (granted I just asked my last question yesterday). But in general, I have found open source support to be superior to commerce support. I haven't worked with Microsoft specifically, but other support I get from commercial products is usually an email address or phone number that goes to a general help desk. This people typically have less knowledge about the product than I do. They can't conceptualize the problem I am having and they usually just run through a list of typical problems and solutions. Open source projects, when they have a good community surrounding them, are just the opposite. You are getting support directly from the experts. As long as you do your work to isolate the problem and report the information about the problem, most of the time you will get a solution to your problem. So I guess my point is I can't really speak to this community yet, because I haven't been participating in it yet for long enough, but just because you have had a bad experience with this oepn source project, don't say that commercial support is better than open source. If you want to attack the axis community specifically, fine, but there are a lot of open source projects that have communities that offer a lot of help. You are making broad generalizations about M$ vs. open source based on your experience with one open source community. On 10/28/05, McPhail, Jeff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I must say that I'm also extremely disappointed with Axis and this usergroup. I didn't like the fact that you have to sign up to receive ALL emails in order to participate -- I've never seen this before. So because I was in a jam and needed and answer, I joined and asked my question. I posted the question 5 times in different forms over a 3 week period and didn't get one response -- nothing. So I then tried to unsubscribe and it didn't work. I followed the instructions in the auto-reply given for troubleshooting unsubscribes and that didn't work. So I emailed the administrator (his email was in the autoreply, but of course nowhere to be found on the axis site) and got a reply about 3 days later telling me that the reason that my unsubscribe didn't work was because my email address was not on the list. So I responded assuring him that I am still on the list and am getting hundreds of messages a week (to my work email mind you) and I added a copy of the email header of one of the list emails I received with my email return path etc. -- I got no response. Also since the sender in the list emails is not axis-user@ws.apache.org but instead the individual senders address, I can't even mark them as spam to filter them (not a very smart setup, not to mention the privacy issues). This is becoming a real nuisance and it appears that I have no recourse. I've tried emailing the general Apache help and got no response, and of course there is not a single phone number on the either the apache or axis web sites. This is bush league support. No wonder so many people prefer to use Microsoft products. Maybe not all of their solutions are optimal (although I'm not sure how true this is anymore) but everything is much easier to implement, and interconnect with different technologies under the Microsoft umbrella. And when you have a problem, the support sites available are much superior -- I've never posted an issue about a microsoft product where I didn't have it solved within a day or two. The open source concept is great when you're a student and can't afford to fork over a grand or two for software, but when you use it for business apps and factor in the time to implement and the extra tens of thousands of dollars in man hours per year to fix bugs, Microsoft is a much cheaper solution. I would be extremely grateful to anyone to can tell me how to get off of this list. Thank you. Cheers, Jeff. -Original Message- From: Paul Grillo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 10:15 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain. We used Axis 1.2 to deploy a single SOAP service that was required of us by one of our major partners that dictated a .NET interface complete with SOAP element signature, timestamp, and encryption. I will say that we got this working very nicely. I am appreciative of the work. I will say that my interactions with the WSS4J folks was extremely helpful, and I thank them very much. So, that is a great success and I thank everybody that contributed. Now as I look to go a little more mainstream within the rest of our products at our company, I began taking a closer look at Axis, including java data binding dependencies which are critical because of the various products our company produces that will need
RE: I give up
Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but I cannot help but wonder if the support level is not affected by Covalent now selling support for Axis and Covalent's close relationship with current and former Axis developers (some of whom work for Covalent). Has commercialism made its way into the open source ranks? -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Paul Barry Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 12:55 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up I will agree that on this mailing list, so far, the few questions that I have asked have gone unresponded to (granted I just asked my last question yesterday). But in general, I have found open source support to be superior to commerce support. I haven't worked with Microsoft specifically, but other support I get from commercial products is usually an email address or phone number that goes to a general help desk. This people typically have less knowledge about the product than I do. They can't conceptualize the problem I am having and they usually just run through a list of typical problems and solutions. Open source projects, when they have a good community surrounding them, are just the opposite. You are getting support directly from the experts. As long as you do your work to isolate the problem and report the information about the problem, most of the time you will get a solution to your problem. So I guess my point is I can't really speak to this community yet, because I haven't been participating in it yet for long enough, but just because you have had a bad experience with this oepn source project, don't say that commercial support is better than open source. If you want to attack the axis community specifically, fine, but there are a lot of open source projects that have communities that offer a lot of help. You are making broad generalizations about M$ vs. open source based on your experience with one open source community. On 10/28/05, McPhail, Jeff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I must say that I'm also extremely disappointed with Axis and this usergroup. I didn't like the fact that you have to sign up to receive ALL emails in order to participate -- I've never seen this before. So because I was in a jam and needed and answer, I joined and asked my question. I posted the question 5 times in different forms over a 3 week period and didn't get one response -- nothing. So I then tried to unsubscribe and it didn't work. I followed the instructions in the auto-reply given for troubleshooting unsubscribes and that didn't work. So I emailed the administrator (his email was in the autoreply, but of course nowhere to be found on the axis site) and got a reply about 3 days later telling me that the reason that my unsubscribe didn't work was because my email address was not on the list. So I responded assuring him that I am still on the list and am getting hundreds of messages a week (to my work email mind you) and I added a copy of the email header of one of the list emails I received with my email return path etc. -- I got no response. Also since the sender in the list emails is not axis-user@ws.apache.org but instead the individual senders address, I can't even mark them as spam to filter them (not a very smart setup, not to mention the privacy issues). This is becoming a real nuisance and it appears that I have no recourse. I've tried emailing the general Apache help and got no response, and of course there is not a single phone number on the either the apache or axis web sites. This is bush league support. No wonder so many people prefer to use Microsoft products. Maybe not all of their solutions are optimal (although I'm not sure how true this is anymore) but everything is much easier to implement, and interconnect with different technologies under the Microsoft umbrella. And when you have a problem, the support sites available are much superior -- I've never posted an issue about a microsoft product where I didn't have it solved within a day or two. The open source concept is great when you're a student and can't afford to fork over a grand or two for software, but when you use it for business apps and factor in the time to implement and the extra tens of thousands of dollars in man hours per year to fix bugs, Microsoft is a much cheaper solution. I would be extremely grateful to anyone to can tell me how to get off of this list. Thank you. Cheers, Jeff. -Original Message- From: Paul Grillo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 10:15 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain. We used Axis 1.2 to deploy a single SOAP service that was required of us by one of our major partners that dictated a .NET interface complete with SOAP element signature, timestamp, and encryption. I will say that we
Re: I give up
Ken, Truth is everyone is working hard on Axis2... -- dims On 10/28/05, Hoying, Ken [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but I cannot help but wonder if the support level is not affected by Covalent now selling support for Axis and Covalent's close relationship with current and former Axis developers (some of whom work for Covalent). Has commercialism made its way into the open source ranks? -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Paul Barry Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 12:55 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up I will agree that on this mailing list, so far, the few questions that I have asked have gone unresponded to (granted I just asked my last question yesterday). But in general, I have found open source support to be superior to commerce support. I haven't worked with Microsoft specifically, but other support I get from commercial products is usually an email address or phone number that goes to a general help desk. This people typically have less knowledge about the product than I do. They can't conceptualize the problem I am having and they usually just run through a list of typical problems and solutions. Open source projects, when they have a good community surrounding them, are just the opposite. You are getting support directly from the experts. As long as you do your work to isolate the problem and report the information about the problem, most of the time you will get a solution to your problem. So I guess my point is I can't really speak to this community yet, because I haven't been participating in it yet for long enough, but just because you have had a bad experience with this oepn source project, don't say that commercial support is better than open source. If you want to attack the axis community specifically, fine, but there are a lot of open source projects that have communities that offer a lot of help. You are making broad generalizations about M$ vs. open source based on your experience with one open source community. On 10/28/05, McPhail, Jeff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I must say that I'm also extremely disappointed with Axis and this usergroup. I didn't like the fact that you have to sign up to receive ALL emails in order to participate -- I've never seen this before. So because I was in a jam and needed and answer, I joined and asked my question. I posted the question 5 times in different forms over a 3 week period and didn't get one response -- nothing. So I then tried to unsubscribe and it didn't work. I followed the instructions in the auto-reply given for troubleshooting unsubscribes and that didn't work. So I emailed the administrator (his email was in the autoreply, but of course nowhere to be found on the axis site) and got a reply about 3 days later telling me that the reason that my unsubscribe didn't work was because my email address was not on the list. So I responded assuring him that I am still on the list and am getting hundreds of messages a week (to my work email mind you) and I added a copy of the email header of one of the list emails I received with my email return path etc. -- I got no response. Also since the sender in the list emails is not axis-user@ws.apache.org but instead the individual senders address, I can't even mark them as spam to filter them (not a very smart setup, not to mention the privacy issues). This is becoming a real nuisance and it appears that I have no recourse. I've tried emailing the general Apache help and got no response, and of course there is not a single phone number on the either the apache or axis web sites. This is bush league support. No wonder so many people prefer to use Microsoft products. Maybe not all of their solutions are optimal (although I'm not sure how true this is anymore) but everything is much easier to implement, and interconnect with different technologies under the Microsoft umbrella. And when you have a problem, the support sites available are much superior -- I've never posted an issue about a microsoft product where I didn't have it solved within a day or two. The open source concept is great when you're a student and can't afford to fork over a grand or two for software, but when you use it for business apps and factor in the time to implement and the extra tens of thousands of dollars in man hours per year to fix bugs, Microsoft is a much cheaper solution. I would be extremely grateful to anyone to can tell me how to get off of this list. Thank you. Cheers, Jeff. -Original Message- From: Paul Grillo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 10:15 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain. We used Axis 1.2 to deploy
Re: I give up
We use Axis exclusively for our web service needs and I find it to be a wonderful solution. I have had problems with Axis, but I have worked through them and with patience, there is no problem that cannot be solved. I understand that a lot of people do not have the time/patience to deal with problems that using open source software may raise. The fact is, all the folks at the Apache Software Foundation develop great software and I would be up the creek without a paddle if it wasn't for them. Davanum Srinivas tries very hard to help people with problems they may have with Axis. I can't imagine the time he probably spends just writing and reading emails. It is not fair for people to be complaining that questions go unanswered. If Axis is not for you, fine. Don't complain about it and don't do things like make a yahoo account called axisisamess and send emails to the list just to vent your frustration. If you don't know how to use filters, then that is not Davanum Srinivas' problem. Please do not try to trivialize their work, they offer great software to us and offer to answer questions without asking anything in return. Please continue to help those of us who appreciate it. We are very happy with your software. --Brice (CHRONOS http://chronos.org)
Re: I give up
Fair enough. I agree that the expertize on the open source side is superior and is probably better for more hardcore software deployments such as large networks/web sites, mission critical applications etc. etc.But for small to medium business apps it has been my experience that if you really need to get to the bottom of an issue it is better to have someone accountable who wants your business. You have the power to withhold payment or drop the vendor entirely if their support doesn't solve your issues. However I will concede and retract my statement about open source in general and re-direct specifically to axis. Cheers, Jeff.Paul Barry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I will agree that on this mailing list, so far, the few questions thatI have asked have gone unresponded to (granted I just asked my lastquestion yesterday). But in general, I have found open source supportto be superior to commerce support. I haven't worked with Microsoftspecifically, but other support I get from commercial products isusually an email address or phone number that goes to a general helpdesk. This people typically have less knowledge about the productthan I do. They can't conceptualize the problem I am having and theyusually just run through a list of typical problems and solutions. Open source projects, when they have a good community surroundingthem, are just the opposite. You are getting support directly fromthe experts. As long as you do your work to isolate the problem andreport the information about the prob lem, most of the time you willget a solution to your problem.So I guess my point is I can't really speak to this community yet,because I haven't been participating in it yet for long enough, butjust because you have had a bad experience with this oepn sourceproject, don't say that commercial support is better than open source.If you want to attack the axis community specifically, fine, butthere are a lot of open source projects that have communities thatoffer a lot of help. You are making broad generalizations about M$vs. open source based on your experience with one open sourcecommunity.On 10/28/05, McPhail, Jeff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: I must say that I'm also extremely disappointed with Axis and this usergroup. I didn't like the fact that you have to sign up to receive ALL emails in order to participate -- I've never seen this before. So because I was in a jam and needed and answer, I jo ined and asked my question. I posted the question 5 times in different forms over a 3 week period and didn't get one response -- nothing. So I then tried to unsubscribe and it didn't work. I followed the instructions in the auto-reply given for troubleshooting unsubscribes and that didn't work. So I emailed the administrator (his email was in the autoreply, but of course nowhere to be found on the axis site) and got a reply about 3 days later telling me that the reason that my unsubscribe didn't work was because my email address was not on the list. So I responded assuring him that I am still on the list and am getting hundreds of messages a week (to my work email mind you) and I added a copy of the email header of one of the list emails I received with my email return path etc. -- I got no response. Also since the sender in the list emails is not axis-user@ws.apache.org but in stead the individual senders address, I can't even mark them as spam to filter them (not a very smart setup, not to mention the privacy issues). This is becoming a real nuisance and it appears that I have no recourse. I've tried emailing the general Apache help and got no response, and of course there is not a single phone number on the either the apache or axis web sites. This is bush league support. No wonder so many people prefer to use Microsoft products. Maybe not all of their solutions are optimal (although I'm not sure how true this is anymore) but everything is much easier to implement, and interconnect with different technologies under the Microsoft umbrella. And when you have a problem, the support sites available are much superior -- I've never posted an issue about a microsoft product where I didn't have it solved within a day or two. The open source concept is great when you're a student and can't afford to fork over a grand or two for software, but when you use it for business apps and factor in the time to implement and the extra tens of thousands of dollars in man hours per year to fix bugs, Microsoft is a much cheaper solution. I would be extremely grateful to anyone to can tell me how to get off of this list. Thank you. Cheers, Jeff. -Original Message- From: Paul Grillo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 10:15 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain. We used Axis 1.2 to deploy a single SOAP service that was required of us by one of our major partners that dictated a .NET interface co
RE: I give up
I don't know why it should be, but it seems to me that there's a higher consumer to provider ratio on the Axis list than on the others I subscribe to. I've been lurking for a few weeks. Because I'm thinking about using Axis but haven't actually started to do so, I have nothing of a technical nature to contribute. I've subscribed to other lists for years, and after a while, I know enough to respond to some questions. I view this as a) giving back to the community that developed the project and helped me master it, and b) freeing up developers so they can focus on developing the next version. I find it very satisfying to help out, and I often deepen my knowledge in the process. This list seems different for some reason. I can't verify this, especially since I haven't been subscribing for very long, but it feels like there aren't many people other than the developers helping out. (Those that do, however, often offer prodigious amounts of knowledgeable insight. I won't name names for fear of forgetting someone, but I hope you know who you are.) I get the sense that people join to ask a question, then unsubscribe once they have an answer. Some of this is to be expected, of course, but maybe it happens more on the Axis list, for whatever reason. One might construe this as a challenge in the open-source style: if you don't like the level of support on the list, stick around and help make it better! -Original Message- From: Davanum Srinivas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 1:14 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up Ken, Truth is everyone is working hard on Axis2... -- dims On 10/28/05, Hoying, Ken [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but I cannot help but wonder if the support level is not affected by Covalent now selling support for Axis and Covalent's close relationship with current and former Axis developers (some of whom work for Covalent). Has commercialism made its way into the open source ranks?
Re: I give up
: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain. We used Axis 1.2 to deploy a single SOAP service that was required of us by one of our major partners that dictated a .NET interface complete with SOAP element si gnature, timestamp, and encryption. I will say that we got this working very nicely. I am appreciative of the work. I will say that my interactions with the WSS4J folks was extremely helpful, and I thank them very much. So, that is a great success and I thank everybody that contributed. Now as I look to go a little more mainstream within the rest of our products at our company, I began taking a closer look at Axis, including java data binding dependencies which are critical because of the various products our company produces that will need to adhere to the bound XSD Objects. I need to insure that I have some independence when choosing this piece of the puzzle. I have looked at AXIS and AXIS2. I have had a few questions related to this. My major frustration is as my inability to get answers to what I thought were fairly simple questions. Perhaps they are either not BR simple, or thought as stupid. I'm not talking just about zeroing in on a bug and submitting it to JIRA, I'm talking about some input about even whether something is doable, not just how. Now before anybody comes down on me, I am fully aware of where my expectations should be vis a vis open source software, mailing lists, etc. I do not feel that I am owed anything when using this software. I have found, however, a little more help in other areas when using open source. I have, in fact, solved a myriad of problems on my own within Axis. I find myself in the bowels of the code trying to figure out what it's doing etc, so to solve my own problems. I do, however, have to factor in the time spent to research and solve these issues. I have posted several questions and generally do not even get a response, or an I don't know, though I suppose the lack of a response is an I don't know. So, it's gotten to the point where I don't bother. In terms of Axis, I feel that I need to go in another direction simply because of my inability to get a straight answer around data binding support (for example) now or in the future in Axis or in Axis2. I have asked what I believe is a simple question, whether a particular class that seems like it should be thread safe is so (just another example). Generally speaking if somebody asked me about most any class I've designed and built as to whether it was designed that way, I could come up with an answer. Yet, no answer. Yes, yes, if a class is not advertised as Threadsafe, consider that it isn't. Lack of documentation, however, doesn't confirm the default assumption. But my bigger concern is the unknown. I don't have confidence that when and if I run into future problems I can find the resources or help to get around problems. Perhaps my expectations are much too high. Of other products that we use and have had very good success is Hibernate, Castor, WSS4J (as mentioned above). I just don't get a comfortable feeling when working with Axis ... Okay, I'm big enough for somebody to tell me to not let the door hit me in the you know where as I leave. Again, I'm not angry, I'm not even largely disappointed. I've just been forced to make a decision based on what is... Perhaps in awhile I'll return to see what's up with Axis2. -paul -Original Message- From: Davanum Srinivas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 11:07 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up Kurt, Looking at your postings, i don't see much from you in terms of engaging the user or developer community to ask for help. http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devw=2r=1s=olsenq=b http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-userw=2r=1s=olsenq=b Your specific email to Tom (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112801670512125w=2)...i have no clue how to help. i did reply back to a prev mail on that thread (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112692662128194w=2) If you have a problem with Macromedia or eBay folks, We can't really help. If you have a problem with latest releases of Axis, we can help if you add JIRA bugs (and chase us!) on the axis-dev@ list. If you need production/development support, there are avenues for that as well. Am sorry you had a bad experience, thanks for the feedback. -- dims On 10/27/05, Kurt Olsen wrote: 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
RE: I give up
I agree with Brice. Let's not forget the fact that Axis has played a key role in bringing SOAP technologies to where it is in the market today. It is always easier to complain about things you don't have than to volunteer and contribute to eliminate them. Thanks Jai -Original Message- From: Brice [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 12:23 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up We use Axis exclusively for our web service needs and I find it to be a wonderful solution. I have had problems with Axis, but I have worked through them and with patience, there is no problem that cannot be solved. I understand that a lot of people do not have the time/patience to deal with problems that using open source software may raise. The fact is, all the folks at the Apache Software Foundation develop great software and I would be up the creek without a paddle if it wasn't for them. Davanum Srinivas tries very hard to help people with problems they may have with Axis. I can't imagine the time he probably spends just writing and reading emails. It is not fair for people to be complaining that questions go unanswered. If Axis is not for you, fine. Don't complain about it and don't do things like make a yahoo account called axisisamess and send emails to the list just to vent your frustration. If you don't know how to use filters, then that is not Davanum Srinivas' problem. Please do not try to trivialize their work, they offer great software to us and offer to answer questions without asking anything in return. Please continue to help those of us who appreciate it. We are very happy with your software. --Brice (CHRONOS http://chronos.org) - This e-mail message may contain privileged and/or confidential information, and is intended to be received only by persons entitled to receive such information. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately. Please delete it and all attachments from any servers, hard drives or any other media. Other use of this e-mail by you is strictly prohibited. All e-mails and attachments sent and received are subject to monitoring, reading and archival by Monsanto. The recipient of this e-mail is solely responsible for checking for the presence of Viruses or other Malware. Monsanto accepts no liability for any damage caused by any such code transmitted by or accompanying this e-mail or any attachment. -
RE: I give up
Brice, Your point is well taken. And I agree that some of the people on the Axis list indeed do a lot of hard work without any strings attached - but even they cannot cover 100% of questions, so you can see some queries unanswered. While this is probably fine for small budget projects, however, most corporations have a need for support to respond back within a specified time frame - which cannot be guaranteed with open source support. Without blaming either side - (where would we all be without open source anyway), all I say is that most major corporations do not have time to invest in finding out where the problem is within a product, and hence prefer paid products that have defined support available. On the other hand, for a small-budget RnD kind or project, or a student project - open source is the way to go. This has actually become the defacto practice in industry. Regards, Chetan The information contained in this e-mail may be confidential and is intended solely for the use of the named addressee. Access, copying or re-use of the e-mail or any information contained therein by any other person is not authorized. If you are not the intended recipient please notify us immediately by returning the e-mail to the originator.(17b)
Re: I give up
FYI, Actually there a few of us that are on IRC most of the time as well. #apache-axis on freenode just like other Apache projects. On 10/28/05, Jesse Pelton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't know why it should be, but it seems to me that there's a higher consumer to provider ratio on the Axis list than on the others I subscribe to. I've been lurking for a few weeks. Because I'm thinking about using Axis but haven't actually started to do so, I have nothing of a technical nature to contribute. I've subscribed to other lists for years, and after a while, I know enough to respond to some questions. I view this as a) giving back to the community that developed the project and helped me master it, and b) freeing up developers so they can focus on developing the next version. I find it very satisfying to help out, and I often deepen my knowledge in the process. This list seems different for some reason. I can't verify this, especially since I haven't been subscribing for very long, but it feels like there aren't many people other than the developers helping out. (Those that do, however, often offer prodigious amounts of knowledgeable insight. I won't name names for fear of forgetting someone, but I hope you know who you are.) I get the sense that people join to ask a question, then unsubscribe once they have an answer. Some of this is to be expected, of course, but maybe it happens more on the Axis list, for whatever reason. One might construe this as a challenge in the open-source style: if you don't like the level of support on the list, stick around and help make it better! -Original Message- From: Davanum Srinivas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 1:14 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up Ken, Truth is everyone is working hard on Axis2... -- dims On 10/28/05, Hoying, Ken [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but I cannot help but wonder if the support level is not affected by Covalent now selling support for Axis and Covalent's close relationship with current and former Axis developers (some of whom work for Covalent). Has commercialism made its way into the open source ranks? -- Davanum Srinivas : http://wso2.com/blogs/
Re: I give up
I'm not trivializing their work, but I have been trying for weeks to get off this list and have had no responses until now! I am not questioning the quality of axis software, (I have been using it wihout issue for over a year -- until the issue that prompted me to join this list) but have been extremely frustrated with this site and the fact that I could not get a response from administrators or find a phone number etc. As I mentioned in another email : Why should I have to set up a filter permantently on my work email because I can't get off of a list of a major software site --this is not a cracks or adult site. Ihad to create another email becausethemessage I sent from my otheraddress bounced back (because I am partially unsubscribed -- I receive but cannot send).This whole exercise has caused me a significant loss of time, and hasnot solved my issue.So forgive me if I vent my frustration with an email name. Brice [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We use Axis exclusively for our web service needs and I find it to be awonderful solution. I have had problems with Axis, but I have workedthrough them and with patience, there is no problem that cannot besolved. I understand that a lot of people do not have the time/patienceto deal with problems that using open source software may raise. Thefact is, all the folks at the Apache Software Foundation develop greatsoftware and I would be up the creek without a paddle if it wasn't forthem. Davanum Srinivas tries very hard to help people with problems they mayhave with Axis. I can't imagine the time he probably spends justwriting and reading emails. It is not fair for people to be complainingthat questions go unanswered. If Axis is not for you, fine. Don'tcomplain about it and don't do things like make a yahoo account called"axisis amess" and send emails to the list just to vent your frustration.If you don't know how to use filters, then that is not Davanum Srinivas'problem. Please do not try to trivialize their work, they offer greatsoftware to us and offer to answer questions without asking anything inreturn.Please continue to help those of us who appreciate it. We are veryhappy with your software.--Brice (CHRONOS http://chronos.org) Yahoo! FareChase - Search multiple travel sites in one click.
RE: I give up ( AXIS is good software)
I have used AXIS software. I felt intial learning curve was high but once you know the details of implementation then I felt the AXIS is easy to use. FAQs page was great. It had most of the answers I wanted. When I define WSDL we took most care in defining datatypes that are supported by .NET and AXIS. This helped in solving interoperability problems. What will make AXIS more popular? A. More supports for questions B. Address Interoperability issues in FAQs Thanks -Venky -Original Message- From: Davanum Srinivas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 10:31 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up Please see http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-userm=113051047826397w=2 thanks, dims On 10/28/05, A B [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Fair enough. I agree that the expertize on the open source side is superior and is probably better for more hardcore software deployments such as large networks/web sites, mission critical applications etc. etc. But for small to medium business apps it has been my experience that if you really need to get to the bottom of an issue it is better to have someone accountable who wants your business. You have the power to withhold payment or drop the vendor entirely if their support doesn't solve your issues. However I will concede and retract my statement about open source in general and re-direct specifically to axis. Cheers, Jeff. Paul Barry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I will agree that on this mailing list, so far, the few questions that I have asked have gone unresponded to (granted I just asked my last question yesterday). But in general, I have found open source support to be superior to commerce support. I haven't worked with Microsoft specifically, but other support I get from commercial products is usually an email address or phone number that goes to a general help desk. This people typically have less knowledge about the product than I do. They can't conceptualize the problem I am having and they usually just run through a list of typical problems and solutions. Open source projects, when they have a good community surrounding them, are just the opposite. You are getting support directly from the experts. As long as you do your work to isolate the problem and report the information about the prob lem, most of the time you will get a solution to your problem. So I guess my point is I can't really speak to this community yet, because I haven't been participating in it yet for long enough, but just because you have had a bad experience with this oepn source project, don't say that commercial support is better than open source. If you want to attack the axis community specifically, fine, but there are a lot of open source projects that have communities that offer a lot of help. You are making broad generalizations about M$ vs. open source based on your experience with one open source community. On 10/28/05, McPhail, Jeff wrote: I must say that I'm also extremely disappointed with Axis and this usergroup. I didn't like the fact that you have to sign up to receive ALL emails in order to participate -- I've never seen this before. So because I was in a jam and needed and answer, I jo ined and asked my question. I posted the question 5 times in different forms over a 3 week period and didn't get one response -- nothing. So I then tried to unsubscribe and it didn't work. I followed the instructions in the auto-reply given for troubleshooting unsubscribes and that didn't work. So I emailed the administrator (his email was in the autoreply, but of course nowhere to be found on the axis site) and got a reply about 3 days later telling me that the reason that my unsubscribe didn't work was because my email address was not on the list. So I responded assuring him that I am still on the list and am getting hundreds of messages a week (to my work email mind you) and I added a copy of the email header of one of the list emails I received with my email return path etc. -- I got no response. Also since the sender in the list emails is not axis-user@ws.apache.org but in stead the individual senders address, I can't even mark them as spam to filter them (not a very smart setup, not to mention the privacy issues). This is becoming a real nuisance and it appears that I have no recourse. I've tried emailing the general Apache help and got no response, and of course there is not a single phone number on the either the apache or axis web sites. This is bush league support. No wonder so many people prefer to use Microsoft products. Maybe not all of their solutions are optimal (although I'm not sure how true this is anymore) but everything is much easier to implement, and interconnect with different technologies under the Microsoft umbrella. And when you have a problem, the support sites
RE: I give up ( AXIS is good software)
I wanted to make it clear that I too think axis is good software. Unfortunately, we can't use it at this time. And THAT is the problem. Kurt
Re: I give up
The issue raised up by Kurt (I think) has derived into Is Axis good or bad? but I think a lot of his points are mostly related to Are SOAP Web Services good or bad?. Maybe this list is not the very best place to discuss this issue but all of us here probably have something to say about it. SOAP web services tried to be everything for everybody so the specs became so bloated and full of holes that every implementation was incompatible with the others. The very same problem that SOAP WS tried to fix. So after a couple of years they got together and wrote a long document called WS-I that is probably at least as long as the original WS spec, enumerating all the different ways in which you should and should not implement your WS if you want it to interoperated. This kind of meta-specification should never have occurred. My very humble opinion is: XML is here to stay for some time, the concept of web services (based on something like XML) has been here for a long time (before soap, etc) and is here to stay for some time. However, SOAP/WSDL and friends will rapidly decay into a historical mess that computer historians will study and learn what went wrong. A few months ago I had similar frustrations. After a long night of reading tons of Axis source code to understand what the hell was going on at the low level and trying to come with best practice solutions for my web service at the high level I wrote this little rant: Subject: I'm fed up with SOAP http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-userm=112233378719128w=2 Someone brightly/ironically suggested: It sounds like you need a REST :-) And he is right. For my future projects, unless I *positively* need SOAP, I will go with much simpler solutions. BarZ Internet Banda Ancha Todo el Dia desde $u 490 por mes! __ http://www.internet.com.uy - En Uruguay somos internet
RE: I give up
Can I be taken off the list plz? Ive tried many times to unsubscribe. Sounds like the unsubscribe is definitely bugged. P -Original Message- From: Paul Barry [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 12:55 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up I will agree that on this mailing list, so far, the few questions that I have asked have gone unresponded to (granted I just asked my last question yesterday). But in general, I have found open source support to be superior to commerce support. I haven't worked with Microsoft specifically, but other support I get from commercial products is usually an email address or phone number that goes to a general help desk. This people typically have less knowledge about the product than I do. They can't conceptualize the problem I am having and they usually just run through a list of typical problems and solutions. Open source projects, when they have a good community surrounding them, are just the opposite. You are getting support directly from the experts. As long as you do your work to isolate the problem and report the information about the problem, most of the time you will get a solution to your problem. So I guess my point is I can't really speak to this community yet, because I haven't been participating in it yet for long enough, but just because you have had a bad experience with this oepn source project, don't say that commercial support is better than open source. If you want to attack the axis community specifically, fine, but there are a lot of open source projects that have communities that offer a lot of help. You are making broad generalizations about M$ vs. open source based on your experience with one open source community. On 10/28/05, McPhail, Jeff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I must say that I'm also extremely disappointed with Axis and this usergroup. I didn't like the fact that you have to sign up to receive ALL emails in order to participate -- I've never seen this before. So because I was in a jam and needed and answer, I joined and asked my question. I posted the question 5 times in different forms over a 3 week period and didn't get one response -- nothing. So I then tried to unsubscribe and it didn't work. I followed the instructions in the auto-reply given for troubleshooting unsubscribes and that didn't work. So I emailed the administrator (his email was in the autoreply, but of course nowhere to be found on the axis site) and got a reply about 3 days later telling me that the reason that my unsubscribe didn't work was because my email address was not on the list. So I responded assuring him that I am still on the list and am getting hundreds of messages a week (to my work email mind you) and I added a copy of the email header of one of the list emails I received with my email return path etc. -- I got no response. Also since the sender in the list emails is not axis-user@ws.apache.org but instead the individual senders address, I can't even mark them as spam to filter them (not a very smart setup, not to mention the privacy issues). This is becoming a real nuisance and it appears that I have no recourse. I've tried emailing the general Apache help and got no response, and of course there is not a single phone number on the either the apache or axis web sites. This is bush league support. No wonder so many people prefer to use Microsoft products. Maybe not all of their solutions are optimal (although I'm not sure how true this is anymore) but everything is much easier to implement, and interconnect with different technologies under the Microsoft umbrella. And when you have a problem, the support sites available are much superior -- I've never posted an issue about a microsoft product where I didn't have it solved within a day or two. The open source concept is great when you're a student and can't afford to fork over a grand or two for software, but when you use it for business apps and factor in the time to implement and the extra tens of thousands of dollars in man hours per year to fix bugs, Microsoft is a much cheaper solution. I would be extremely grateful to anyone to can tell me how to get off of this list. Thank you. Cheers, Jeff. -Original Message- From: Paul Grillo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 10:15 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain. We used Axis 1.2 to deploy a single SOAP service that was required of us by one of our major partners that dictated a .NET interface complete with SOAP element signature, timestamp, and encryption. I will say that we got this working very nicely. I am appreciative of the work. I will say that my interactions with the WSS4J folks was extremely helpful, and I thank them very much. So, that is a great success and I thank
Re: I give up
On Oct 28, 2005, at 10:36 AM, Wagle Chetan wrote: Your point is well taken. And I agree that some of the people on the Axis list indeed do a lot of hard work without any strings attached - but even they cannot cover 100% of questions, so you can see some queries unanswered. While this is probably fine for small budget projects, however, most corporations have a need for support to respond back within a specified time frame - which cannot be guaranteed with open source support. I have my own frustrations with SOAP, Axis, and this list, but this one strikes me as unreasonable. If you want paid support, it's available. As Dims said twice now, paid support _is_ available. http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-userm=113051047826397w=2 -- Scott Lamb http://www.slamb.org/
Re: I give up
I can sum up my views on this with the following statement: Complicated things are hard to do. Web services is tricky stuff. For those of you who have been critical, offer up a better alternative. Enlighten us, we're all ears. But don't say REST, because it doesn't have all of the features and capabilites of SOAP. I'll finish up with one more comment - This newgroup needs a moderator. While some of the comments on this thread have been thought provoking, many were just SPAM and should be filtered out from those of us who are busy trying to use this software. Shawn
Re: I give up
: Paul Grillo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 10:15 AM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: RE: I give up I would like to add that, to a large extent, I feel Kurt's pain.We used Axis 1.2 to deploy a single SOAP service that was required of us by one of our major partners that dictated a .NET interface complete with SOAP element signature, timestamp, and encryption.I will say that we got this working very nicely.I am appreciative of the work.I will say that my interactions with the WSS4J folks was extremely helpful, and I thank them very much. So, that is a great success and I thank everybody that contributed. Now as I look to go a little more mainstream within the rest of our products at our company, I began taking a closer look at Axis, including java data binding dependencies which are critical because of the various products our company produces that will need to adhere to the bound XSD Objects.I need to insure that I have some independence when choosing this piece of the puzzle. I have looked at AXIS and AXIS2.I have had a few questions related to this.My major frustration is as my inability to get answers to what I thought were fairly simple questions. Perhaps they are either not simple, or thought as stupid.I'm not talking just about zeroing in on a bug and submitting it to JIRA, I'm talking about some input about even whether something is doable, not just how. Now before anybody comes down on me, I am fully aware of where my expectations should be vis a vis open source software, mailing lists, etc.I do not feel that I am owed anything when using this software.I have found, however, a little more help in other areas when using open source.I have, in fact, solved a myriad of problems on my own within Axis. I find myself in the bowels of the code trying to figure out what it's doing etc, so to solve my own problems.I do, however, have to factor in the time spent to research and solve these issues. I have posted several questions and generally do not even get a response, or an I don't know, though I suppose the lack of a response is an I don't know.So, it's gotten to the point where I don't bother.In terms of Axis, I feel that I need to go in another direction simply because of my inability to get a straight answer around data binding support (for example) now or in the future in Axis or in Axis2.I have asked what I believe is a simple question, whether a particular class that seems like it should be thread safe is so (just another example). Generally speaking if somebody asked me about most any class I've designed and built as to whether it was designed that way, I could come up with an answer.Yet, no answer.Yes, yes, if a class is not advertised as Threadsafe, consider that it isn't.Lack of documentation, however, doesn't confirm the default assumption. But my bigger concern is the unknown.I don't have confidence that when and if I run into future problems I can find the resources or help to get around problems.Perhaps my expectations are much too high.Of other products that we use and have had very good success is Hibernate, Castor, WSS4J (as mentioned above).I just don't get a comfortable feeling when working with Axis ... Okay, I'm big enough for somebody to tell me to not let the door hit me in the you know where as I leave.Again, I'm not angry, I'm not even largely disappointed.I've just been forced to make a decision based on what is... Perhaps in awhile I'll return to see what's up with Axis2. -paul -Original Message- From: Davanum Srinivas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 11:07 PM To: axis-user@ws.apache.org Cc: axis-dev@ws.apache.org Subject: Re: I give up Kurt, Looking at your postings, i don't see much from you in terms of engaging the user or developer community to ask for help. http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devw=2r=1s=olsenq=b http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-userw=2r=1s=olsenq=b Your specific email to Tom (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112801670512125w=2)...i have no clue how to help. i did reply back to a prev mail on that thread (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112692662128194w=2) If you have a problem with Macromedia or eBay folks, We can't really help. If you have a problem with latest releases of Axis, we can help if you add JIRA bugs (and chase us!) on the axis-dev@ list. If you need production/development support, there are avenues for that as well. Am sorry you had a bad experience, thanks for the feedback. -- dims On 10/27/05, Kurt Olsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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
Re: I give up
Jeff, If you want a single throat to choke, then purchase a support agreement from one of the five commercial ventures that supplies support for Axis. If you want a product that has more comprehensive tooling and documentation, then purchase a commercial product. Open source software may not cost anything in terms of license fees, but as Jonathan Schwartz says, open source software is free as in free puppy. There are plenty of other costs that go into the long-term care and feeding of open source. Adopting an open source project should never be a light decision. It is a serious investment, and you should always spend time to properly assess the health and vitality of the open source project community before making that investment. I would say that Axis has only just recently reached a maturity stage that I would recommend it to a novice OSS user -- the committer team was too small; the release cycles took too long; the documentation was spotty and incomplete; and no professional services were available. But the community has been revitalized during the last 6 months. The project is still going through a transition from Axis 1 to Axis 2, and this will cause some disruption to the project -- most of the dev team is working on Axis 2. If the situation is too disruptive for your tastes right now, I encourage you to take a break for a bit, but please come back in 6 months and check it out again. AnneOn 10/28/05, A B [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Fair enough. I agree that the expertize on the open source side is superior and is probably better for more hardcore software deployments such as large networks/web sites, mission critical applications etc. etc.But for small to medium business apps it has been my experience that if you really need to get to the bottom of an issue it is better to have someone accountable who wants your business. You have the power to withhold payment or drop the vendor entirely if their support doesn't solve your issues. However I will concede and retract my statement about open source in general and re-direct specifically to axis. Cheers, Jeff.snip Yahoo! FareChase - Search multiple travel sites in one click.
Re: I give up
Kurt, Looking at your postings, i don't see much from you in terms of engaging the user or developer community to ask for help. http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devw=2r=1s=olsenq=b http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-userw=2r=1s=olsenq=b Your specific email to Tom (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112801670512125w=2)...i have no clue how to help. i did reply back to a prev mail on that thread (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-devm=112692662128194w=2) If you have a problem with Macromedia or eBay folks, We can't really help. If you have a problem with latest releases of Axis, we can help if you add JIRA bugs (and chase us!) on the axis-dev@ list. If you need production/development support, there are avenues for that as well. Am sorry you had a bad experience, thanks for the feedback. -- dims On 10/27/05, Kurt Olsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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 -- Davanum Srinivas : http://wso2.com/blogs/
