The Knopflerfish Axis port

The Knopflerfish Axis port provides SOAP/Web service access to any OSGi bundle, both for exporting OSGi services as Web Services and for importing web services into an OSGI framework.

The software found in the subdirectories to this directory are:

axis-osgi

This is an OSGi bundlification of a standard Axis server. The standard Axis server is designed to be running in a servlet version 2.3 environment, while the OSGi HTTP service is based on a servlet 2.1 environment. It should be noted that no modifications have been made to any of the Axis classes, so all code specific to the OSGi port is made as pure "extensions". In addition to the bundlification of the Axis server the axis-osgi bundle offers the ability to export services, registered on the OSGi framework service registry, as SOAP services. It should be noted that for this to work the exported objects must not expose any data types not supported by SOAP. In order to export a service object as a SOAP service, the only thing needed is to set a property named "SOAP.service.name" on the registered service. As a convenience org.knopflerfish.service.axis.AxisAdmin.SOAP_SERVICE_NAME is a String constant that holds this name. The property value should be of type java.lang.String and its value will be used as the name of the exposed SOAP service.

The inital SOAP configuration of the Axis server is given by the file "/axis/server-config.wsdd". In case you want to add some services or for some other reason modify the initial configuration, this is where to do it.

The code to make all this work consist of just a few quite small classes (not counting all Axis classes) so it is quite easy to get an overview of the porting effort. However it took some time experimenting and studying the Axis code to make this work, so some of the code may be harder to understand.

Note that the axis-osgi bundle depends on the commons-logging bundle to be installed an started. Further if your JRE does not support an XML parser you need to provide that as well (e.g Xerces).

The axis-osgi.jar file is quite large, due to the contained axis.jar (and other contained jars). Some of the Axis classes may be left out, e.g. client related classes, in case you will not run any Axis clients on your OSGi framework, WSDL related classes in case you give up the ability for the server to generate WSDL for the SOAP services. These kind of optimizations have not been performed, but is probably possible to perform in case it becomes critical to reduce the required memory footprint.

soapobject

This is an example of a server side SOAP object.

The soapobject bundle installs a service object into the service registry and sets its SOAP_SERVICE_NAME property to "remoteFW". This will make the axis-osgi bundle (must be run prior to start of the soapobject bundle) create an Axis SOAP service named "remoteFW". Use the following URLs from a Web browser to explore the service.

   http://localhost:8080/axis/services

   http://localhost:8080/axis/services?list

   http://localhost:8080/axis/services/remoteFW?method=getBundles

   http://localhost:8080/axis/services/remoteFW?wsdl

Beware of caching made by the browser, ensure that you are not viewing cached content by performing explicit refresh requests.

soapclient

This is an example of a client side program. The client calls the "remoteFW" service methods, so you need to have the soapobject bundle insatlled and started. The build.xml performs all required steps for the creation and and execution of the client program. The only handcoded module is the Test.java (main class of the client program). The build file will automatically fetch the WSDL from the running OSGi framework, generate the client side stubs and support classes, compile the generated classes as well as Test.java.

When all have been built (compiled) the client program is executed and the results are displayed.

soap_desktop

This is a SOAP service browser written as a plugin for the Swing Desktop. When started, it adds a view that displays all available services on a named SOAP host. The services can be browsed for operations and the operations can be invoked. The SOAP host can be changed to view services on another host.

The default SOAP host is "http://localhost:"

The implementation has only been tested with services generated by exporting OSGi service via Axis, and is not complete in terms of all possible data types. The primitive types and arrays, are however supported, both as input arguments and as results.

soap_remotefw

Complete implemetation of a "remote" OSGi framework, using SOAP. See

for details.

demos