Tutorial for using

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Axis 1.4 with Apache Camel

Introduction

Apache AXIS Axis is/was widely used as a webservice framework. So in line with some of the other tutorials to demonstrate how Camel is not an invasive framework but is flexible and integrates well with existing solution.

We have an existing solution that exposes a webservice using AXIS Axis 1.4 deployed as web applications. This is a common solution. We use contract first so we have AXIS Axis generated source code from an existing wsdl file. Then we show how we introduce Spring and Camel to integrate with AXISAxis.

This tutorial uses the following frameworks:

• Maven 2.0.9
• Apache Camel 1.4.0
• Apache AXIS Axis 1.4
• Spring 2.5.5

Setting up the project to run

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Axis

This first part is about getting the project up to speed with Axis. We are not touching Camel or Spring at this time.

Maven 2

AXIS Axis dependencies is available for maven 2 so we configure our pom.xml as:

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Then we need to configure maven to use Java 1.5 and the axis Axis maven plugin that generates the source code based on the wsdl file:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<wsdl:definitions xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/"
	xmlns:tns="http://reportincident.example.camel.apache.org"
	xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
	xmlns:http="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/http/"
	xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/"
	targetNamespace="http://reportincident.example.camel.apache.org">

	<!-- Type definitions for input- and output parameters for webservice -->
	<wsdl:types>
	<xs:schema targetNamespace="http://reportincident.example.camel.apache.org">
			<xs:element name="inputReportIncident">
				<xs:complexType>
					<xs:sequence>
						<xs:element type="xs:string"  name="incidentId"/>
						<xs:element type="xs:string"  name="incidentDate"/>
						<xs:element type="xs:string"  name="givenName"/>
						<xs:element type="xs:string"  name="familyName"/>
						<xs:element type="xs:string"  name="summary"/>
						<xs:element type="xs:string"  name="details"/>
						<xs:element type="xs:string"  name="email"/>
						<xs:element type="xs:string"  name="phone"/>
					</xs:sequence>
				</xs:complexType>
			</xs:element>
			<xs:element name="outputReportIncident">
				<xs:complexType>
					<xs:sequence>
						<xs:element type="xs:string" name="code"/>
					</xs:sequence>
				</xs:complexType>
			</xs:element>
		</xs:schema>
	</wsdl:types>

	<!-- Message definitions for input and output -->
	<wsdl:message name="inputReportIncident">
		<wsdl:part name="parameters" element="tns:inputReportIncident"/>
	</wsdl:message>
	<wsdl:message name="outputReportIncident">
		<wsdl:part name="parameters" element="tns:outputReportIncident"/>
	</wsdl:message>

	<!-- Port (interface) definitions -->
	<wsdl:portType name="ReportIncidentEndpoint">
		<wsdl:operation name="ReportIncident">
			<wsdl:input message="tns:inputReportIncident"/>
			<wsdl:output message="tns:outputReportIncident"/>
		</wsdl:operation>
	</wsdl:portType>

	<!-- Port bindings to transports and encoding - HTTP, document literal encoding is used -->
	<wsdl:binding name="ReportIncidentBinding" type="tns:ReportIncidentEndpoint">
		<soap:binding transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http"/>
		<wsdl:operation name="ReportIncident">
			<soap:operation
				soapAction="http://reportincident.example.camel.apache.org/ReportIncident"
				style="document"/>
			<wsdl:input>
				<soap:body parts="parameters" use="literal"/>
			</wsdl:input>
			<wsdl:output>
				<soap:body parts="parameters" use="literal"/>
			</wsdl:output>
		</wsdl:operation>
	</wsdl:binding>

	<!-- Service definition -->
	<wsdl:service name="ReportIncidentService">
		<wsdl:port name="ReportIncidentPort" binding="tns:ReportIncidentBinding">
			<soap:address location="http://reportincident.example.camel.apache.org"/>
		</wsdl:port>
	</wsdl:service>

</wsdl:definitions>

Configuring

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Axis

Okay we are now setup for the contract first development and can generate the source file. For now we are still only using standard AXIS Axis and not Spring nor Camel. We still need to setup AXIS Axis as a web application so we configure the web.xml in src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml as:

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>axis</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.apache.axis.transport.http.AxisServlet</servlet-class>
    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>axis</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/services/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

The web.xml just registeres AXIS registers Axis servlet that is handling the incoming web requests to its servlet mapping. We still need to configure AXIS Axis itself and this is done using its special configuration file server-config.wsdd. We nearly get this file for free if we let Axis generate the source code so we run the maven goal:

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.\target\generated-sources\axistools\wsdl2java\org\apache\camel\example\reportincident
deploy.wsdd
InputReportIncident.java
OutputReportIncident.java
ReportIncidentBindingImpl.java
ReportIncidentBindingStub.java
ReportIncidentService_PortType.java
ReportIncidentService_Service.java
ReportIncidentService_ServiceLocator.java
undeploy.wsdd

This is standard AXIS Axis and so far no Camel or Spring has been touched. To implement our webservice we will add our code, so we create a new class AxisReportIncidentService that implements the port type interface where we can implement our code logic what happens when the webservice is invoked.

package org.apache.camel.example.axis;

import org.apache.camel.example.reportincident.InputReportIncident;
import org.apache.camel.example.reportincident.OutputReportIncident;
import org.apache.camel.example.reportincident.ReportIncidentService_PortType;

import java.rmi.RemoteException;

/**
 * Axis webservice
 */
public class AxisReportIncidentService implements ReportIncidentService_PortType {

    public OutputReportIncident reportIncident(InputReportIncident parameters) throws RemoteException {
        System.out.println("Hello AxisReportIncidentService is called from " + parameters.getGivenName());

        OutputReportIncident out = new OutputReportIncident();
        out.setCode("OK");
        return out;
    }

}

Now we need to configure AXIS Axis itself and this is done using its server-config.wsdd file. We nearly get this for for free from the auto generated code, we copy the stuff from deploy.wsdd and made a few modifications:

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The globalConfiguration and transport is not in the deploy.wsdd file so you gotta write that yourself. The service is a 100% copy from deploy.wsdd. Axis has more configuration to it than shown here, but then you should check the AXIS Axis documentation.

What we need to do now is important, as we need to modify the above configuration to use our webservice class than the default one, so we change the classname parameter to our class AxisReportIncidentService:

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Then we can hit the web browser and enter this URL: http://localhost:8080/camel-example-axis/services and you should see the famous AXIS Axis start page with the text And now... Some Services.

Clicking on the .wsdl link shows the wsdl file, but what. It's an auto generated one and not our original .wsdl file. So we need to fix this ASAP and this is done by configuring AXIS Axis in the server-config.wsdd file:

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We would like to be able to get hold of the Spring ApplicationContext from our webservice so we can get access to the glory spring, but how do we do this? And our webservice class AxisReportIncidentService is created and managed by AXIS Axis we want to let Spring do this. So we have two problems.

We solve these problems by creating a delegate class that AXIS Axis creates, and this delegate class gets hold on Spring and then gets our real webservice as a spring bean and invoke the service.

First we create a new class that is 100% independent from AXIS Axis and just a plain POJO. This is our real service.

package org.apache.camel.example.axis;

import org.apache.camel.example.reportincident.InputReportIncident;
import org.apache.camel.example.reportincident.OutputReportIncident;

/**
 * Our real service that is not tied to AXISAxis
 */
public class ReportIncidentService  {

    public OutputReportIncident reportIncident(InputReportIncident parameters) {
        System.out.println("Hello ReportIncidentService is called from " + parameters.getGivenName());

        OutputReportIncident out = new OutputReportIncident();
        out.setCode("OK");
        return out;
    }

}

...

package org.apache.camel.example.axis;

import org.apache.camel.example.reportincident.InputReportIncident;
import org.apache.camel.example.reportincident.OutputReportIncident;
import org.apache.camel.example.reportincident.ReportIncidentService_PortType;
import org.springframework.remoting.jaxrpc.ServletEndpointSupport;

import java.rmi.RemoteException;

/**
 * Axis webservice
 */
public class AxisReportIncidentService extends ServletEndpointSupport implements ReportIncidentService_PortType {

    public OutputReportIncident reportIncident(InputReportIncident parameters) throws RemoteException ServletEndpointSupport implements ReportIncidentService_PortType {

    public OutputReportIncident reportIncident(InputReportIncident parameters) throws RemoteException {
        // get hold of the spring bean from the application context
        ReportIncidentService service = (ReportIncidentService) getApplicationContext().getBean("incidentservice");

        // delegate to the real service
        return service.reportIncident(parameters);
    }

}

To see if everything is okay we run mvn jetty:run.

In the code above we get hold of our service at each request by looking up in the application context. However Spring also supports an init method where we can do this once. So we change the code to:

public class AxisReportIncidentService extends ServletEndpointSupport implements ReportIncidentService_PortType {

    private ReportIncidentService service;

    @Override
    protected void onInit() throws ServiceException {
        // get hold of the spring bean from the application context
        ReportIncidentService service = (ReportIncidentService) getApplicationContext().getBean("incidentservice");
    }

    public OutputReportIncident reportIncident(InputReportIncident parameters) throws RemoteException {
        // delegate to the real service
        return service.reportIncident(parameters);
    }

}

To see if everything is okay we run mvn jetty:runSo now we have integrated Axis with Spring and we are ready for Camel.

Integrating Camel

Again the first step is to add the dependencies to the maven pom.xml file:

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We start our integration with maven using mvn jetty:run. Then we open a browser and hit http://localhost:8080. Jetty is so smart that it display a frontpage with links to the deployed application so just hit the link and you get our application. Now we hit append /services to the URL to access the AXIS Axis frontpage. The URL should be http://localhost:8080/camel-example-axis/services.

...

    public void testReportIncidentWithAxis() throws Exception {
        // the url to the axis webservice exposed by jetty
        URL url = new URL("http://localhost:8080/unittest/services/ReportIncidentPort");

        // axisAxis stuff to get the port where we can send the webservice request
        ReportIncidentService_ServiceLocator locator = new ReportIncidentService_ServiceLocator();
        ReportIncidentService_PortType port = locator.getReportIncidentPort(url);

        // create input to send
        InputReportIncident input = createDummyIncident();
        // send the webservice and get the response
        OutputReportIncident output = port.reportIncident(input);
        assertEquals("OK", output.getCode());

        // should generate a file also
        File file = new File("target/" + input.getIncidentId() + ".txt");
        assertTrue("File should exists", file.exists());
    }

    protected InputReportIncident createDummyIncident() {
        InputReportIncident input = new InputReportIncident();
        input.setEmail("davsclaus@apache.org");
        input.setIncidentId("12345678");
        input.setIncidentDate("2008-07-13");
        input.setPhone("+45 2962 7576");
        input.setSummary("Failed operation");
        input.setDetails("The wrong foot was operated.");
        input.setFamilyName("Ibsen");
        input.setGivenName("Claus");
        return input;
    }

And now we have an unittest that sends a webservice request using good old Axis.TODO: Spring use onInit() to get the service once

TODO: Use spring dependency injection instead of property
TODO: Use Camel annotations
TODO: Maybe a route?
TODO: Use Camel Test Kit
TODO: Refer to Axis documentation. AXIS -> Axis.
TODO: Add more links to Camel stuff
TODO: Link to other tutorials