[Building Sakai] life after axis

[John Bush]

There was discussion at Apereo camp about issues people are having
issues with the old axis 1.4 soap services, and it sounds like we are
not the only ones.  While REST is definitely the preferred integration
approach for anything new, a lot of people have legacy client code
that relies on the axis services.

This is the plan I've been floating around in my head and have done a
little research into.

We create a new webapp that uses cxf.  CXF can generate stubs from
wsdls.  So basically we take our existing wsdls, generate most of the
code, and then its a copy and paste affair from jws files to new
structure.  Wire in spring dependencies and bam you are done.

The one issue is that you can't overload method names any more, I'm
assuming maybe that is part of a newer soap spec, but I'm not sure
there is anyway around that.  SakaiScript has a bunch of overloaded
method names that will need new names, but I'm guessing that would not
cause people too much pain to simply update in client code.

I'm not going to put any energy into attempting to keep the same url
structure, as I think in cases where people have a hard time switching
over they could put rules in Apache or other things that front Sakai
to redirect to the new paths.

So axis will still be there in Sakai 11, but for those that what to
move onto something more stable and not from 2006 they can.

Any thoughts on this approach before I get started ?

-- 
John Bush
602-490-0470

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