Light weight, OSGi based, Axis2 powered, web services application server in 5 minuets

Few days back I blogged about "Embed Eclipse Equinox in a Servlet Container". Let's extend this idea a little bit more to write your own light weight, OSGi based, Axis2 powered, web services application server.

There is an ongoing effort to extend Axis2 Web Services engine to deploy as a bundle in an OSGi environment. The purpose of this extension is to allow deployed bundles to provide services and modules which will be recognized by OSGi based Axis2 engine and deploy them.

Let's create the light weight, OSGi based, Axis2 powered, web services application server using Eclipse Equinox OSGi implementation and Apache Tomcat.

1. Download Apache Tomcat
2. Download bridge.war from Eclipse Equinox.
3. Download commons logging (org.eclipse.equinox.common_3.3.0.v20070426.jar) bundle from Eclipse Equinox.
4. Copy the downloaded bridge.war to Apache Tomcat webapps directory
5. svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/webservices/axis2/scratch/java/saminda/osgi_test osgi_test
6. Go to osgi_test directory and type "mvn clean install -U". You need Maven2 build system.
7. Go to osgi_test/distribution/target directory and unzipped distribution-1.0.0.zip.
8. Copy all the bundles from distribution-1.0.0/plugin folder to /webapps/bridge/WEB-INF/eclipse/plugins and copy commons logging bundle too.
9. Restart Tomcat
10. On the osgi> command prompt start all bundles except fragment host bundles.

11. http://localhost:8080/bridge/services/Version?wsdl
http://localhost:8080/bridge/services/Version?wsdl2
http://localhost:8080/bridge/services/Version/getVersion

You have your personal light weight, OSGi based, Axis2 powered web services application server.