Getting started with web services.

So, I finally decided to upgrade my buzzword bingo and try to out what all the cool business software consultants are up to. The task of the day is to create a web service using Java and whatever tools exist. I spent hours on Google and Wikipedia and didn't really get anywhere, I was completely lost in all of the services, servlets, webapps, soap, tomcats and tomboys that I encountered. Enough with the chit chat, this is what I ended up doing to get create my very own simple web service.

1. Start out with your normal Ubuntu installation
2. Install Tomcat. You'll need the following packages: tomcat6, tomcat6-docs, tomcat6-examples, tomcat6-admin
   
3. Edit /etc/default/tomcat6 and add "TOMCAT6_SECURITY=no". See Reference #2
4. Make sure Tomcat is working by visiting http://localhost:8080/
   
5. Download the standard binary distribution and the web archive distribution (WAR) from http://ws.apache.org/axis2/download.cgi
6. Extract and copy axis2.war to /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps
7. Make sure Axis2 is working properly by visiting http://localhost:8080/axis2/

Done. That was it. In the next post I'll write a brief tutorial of how to create a simple web service in Java using Axis2 and a client in C/C++ using gSOAP.

References.
1. Tomcat 6 on Ubuntu. https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/serverguide/C/tomcat.html