Re: RPG as a Web Service Consumer

[Narayanan R Pillai <strqst400@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 21 March 2004 04:11 pm, Joe Pluta wrote:
> > From: Narayanan R Pillai
> >
> > That message looked too familiar, so I looked at the response on my
>
> server
>
> > when I used a partial HTTP Request, ie
> > http://servername:8080/sanjose/services.
>
> When I try the above, I only get a "not found" (404) message.  If I use
> the service name (http://servername:7080/WSServer/services/Service1).  I
> also note that you're using port 8080, while my service is set up to run
> on port 7080.  Is that something you changed?

No, by default Tomcat runs the HTTP listener on Port 8080. Our current  
configuration is a 
        1. A Win2k Server running Tomcat 4.1
        2. Our old web-application code base + Axis as our web-service provider
        3. Our old business delegate class methods are acting as the exposed 
methods
        
<some stuff snipped>
> I used the WDSC web service wizard, and it didn't create a WSDD, only a
> WSDL.  How confused am I here?
>
You sound like I did when we started, luckily for us both Tomcat and Axis are 
open-source, so finally we read the source code to find our answers. The WSDD 
( or Web Service Deployment Descriptor ) is the thingy that WS provider uses 
for the server-side bindings. The WSDL is the client side description. Under 
normal circumstances, the WSDL is all one sees, the WSDD is for the server to 
digest. We had a problem that our business delegate classes had a far larger 
set of methods than we wanted to expose, so we learnt how to tweak the WSDD 
as well.

> > pps: would you consider running axis within Websphere, to have this
> > functionality ? :)
>
> I may do that, although the ethereal port sniffer is doing a GREAT job
> so far.  It has definitely confirmed my assumption that the request is
> being wrapped as a SOAP document, as well as the response.

If you generate client side stubs from the WSDL, by default, the communication 
will have the SOAP wrappers. As far as Axis is concerned, it does GET/PUT 
just as well. Unfortunately, I have no access to a Websphere installation, so 
I cannot play around and find out how to GET the result from there. :(

As we learnt, the hard way, it was far easier to get the HTTP response ( SOAP 
Wrapper and all ) and digest that than for us to call the Java classes, with 
any amount of stability, from within RPG.

Pillai