Tutorial 2 - SOAP Web Services

The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce the students to Web Services development using the preconfigured Axis2 development environment supplied in the course. During the tutorial, a teacher will be present to help with any practical issues that may arise.

In this tutorial, you will use an example Web Service and extend the capabilities or the service client and implementation in gradual increments.
If you finish the tutorial ahead of time, you are recommended to get started on assignment 2.

Participation in this tutorial is volountary, your work will not be graded.

Development Environment

Download your development environment package from the downloads directory and install it using the instructions found on the Axis2 development environment page.

Tutorial steps

  1. download, install, and familiarize yourself with the development environment
  2. download, build, deploy, and test the AXIOM hello world example Web Service
    • install service: unzip hws_axiom.zip
    • build service: ant dist
    • deploy service: ant deploy
    • test service: ./scripts/greet.sh <yourname> <yourmessage>
    • undeploy service: ant undeploy
  3. inspect the service WSDL and investigate how it maps to the service code
  4. find a WSDL validator and validate the service WSDL (optional)
  5. download the Apache TCP Monitor and use it to inspect the SOAP traffic between client and service
  6. extend the hello world web service to include a method named "sayHello" that uses the same parameter format as greet()
  7. create a service client that uses the sayHello() method
  8. change the parameter format of sayHello() to use a new datatype of your own design
  9. extend the service to have two new methods, one that uses a single parameter and one that uses arrays of your data type
  10. download the WSDL2Java hello world example Web Service, repeat (some of) the steps above, and investigate how to generate service client stubs
  11. investigate how to invoke web services using HTTPS