Getting Started with Axis/C MIME/DIME and MTOM

Question

I am about to start some work on Axis/C. I have a fair idea of C and webservices separately. I am also fairly ok with *nix.

Can someone tell me about the complexity related to creating a webservice with support for MIME/DIME and MTOM with Axis/C? The webservice will be invoked from Java as well as C++ clients.

Does Axis/C have any known limitations in this regard? What are the best starting points for learning Axis/C in general and MTOM et al. support in particular.

Answer 1

I would advise against Apache Axis/C or Axis2c for that matter. Both these projects lack active development and member contribution. Last Axis2c release was in 2009 and Axis/c release page link doesn't even work.

I have developed a reasonably complex web-services implementation (both client and server), and I have ran into these issues:

• Documentation is just OK. Nothing great.
• Returning status codes of your choice is not easy.
• Some HTTP verbs have bugs - for example I couldn't get DELETE to work.
• I have faced issues with the supplied XML library guththila. libxml worked better for me.
• It's hard to build complex REST routes for your application.
• Handling incoming XML objects is quite cumbersome and inconvenient. I ended up writing a library of convenience functions.
• JSON support is missing.
• Your application will tend to become large with each server-side service implementation running into at lease a hundred lines of code.

WSO2 seems to be another option as far as web-services in C is concerned. The Axis2C team is mostly full of WSO2 people anyways. I haven't tried it though, but definitely looks more promising than Axis2C.

Answer 2

I had to modify the code to get it axis 1 to compile on fedora 13 + I believe I had to add a pure virtual some where in the code