Alex Little » axis

Friday 5 May 06

Alex — Fri, 05 May 2006 04:55:22 +0000

Have just switched my axis version over to 1.3 in the hope that this would solve the problem with the Membership service, but that unfortunately hasn’t fixed the problem – I still get the same error message, so going back to Axis 1.1. I’ve added some more debug code (in the EnterpriseServer module) to try and track the problem, but the constructor method for the MembershipManagementImpl isn’t getting called, so I think there is something up with the actual service, rather than the code I’m using

Tuesday 25 April 06

Alex — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 10:57:31 +0000

Made some more progress today with using the Enterprise SDK as I’ve now solved the problem i was having with running Axis 1.1 on Tomcat 5.5. It turned out that in one of my web.xml files it was referring to a listener-class (org.apache.axis.transport.http.AxisHTTPSessionListener) which wasn’t found in axis 1.1 – hence the problem when tomcat tried to start up!! So all my own fault really!

I’ve now got the beginnings of my EnterpriseClient, but I’ve just got to now figure out how in the client I can get ‘hold’ of the whole xml string that has been returned from the EnterpriseServer, rather than just the component parts. Looking at the Plex example, using _responseHolder.value.getGroup() this returns a GroupDType object, which you can then extract parts from (eg getDataSource()), but I can’t see any way to just give the whole xml string that was returned by the EnterpriseServer in the first place. Will keep trying….!

Friday 21 April 06

Alex — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 08:48:15 +0000

Had good couple of days up in Bolton with Scott and at the ELF developers forum. We spent one day going through how to get the Enterprise SDK running, and although it’s not yet completely working I do feel i understand a lot more about it, and we’ve got some sample code which interacts with a database now.

The reason we couldn’t get it actually running was a problem between the different versions of Axis. The cetis-ws-client was built using Axis 1.1, and I’ve been using Axis 1.2, differences in the ‘constants’ package stop them being compatible with each other. So I thought I would try to switch to v1.1, but it I try to run with this I get errors when trying to start up tomcat (5.5), not sure why this is. So the plan is to update the client code so it can use Axis 1.2 instead – hopefully it’s not too much to change

There are some other things for us to decide on too, mainly what to do about getting Moodle connected up to the Enterprise service and we’ve got a couple of options…

1) Build a PHP client for the Enterprise Service. With this option we’re really not sure how big a job this would be, it could be anything from couple of weeks to couple of months or more.

2) Build a client module which then provides a simpler interface for Moodle to connect to. This could be a ‘proper’ web service, or a rest type service.

My feeling is that we go for creating a rest client module for Moodle to connect to , as this ought to be the simplest to create. We need something simple and easy to do, as doing all this Enterprise stuff isn’t meant to be the focus of our project, and we’re in danger of spending all our time getting Enterprise Services working, rather than doing the grouping service!!