Apache Axis2 is a core engine for Web service which is a re-engineered version of the widely used Apache Axis. Axis2 is designed into two functionalities. The stand-alone axis2 server and the axis2 web application which can be deployed into most web servers.
In this article we focus on the later. This article describes the steps involved in deploying the application to tomcat and deploying a sample service shipped as an example with axis2. This article assumes that Tomcat is already installed.

Step 1: Click here to download axis2. Download the source distribution as highlighted below, this is typically used as the stand-alone server. However as a part of our tutorial we would deploy a sample service which is a part of this download.

Download the ZIP file for deployment in Windows.



Download the axis2 application WAR file as highlighted below.



Step 2: Copy the axis2.war into the following directory [TOMCAT_HOME]/webapps and restart tomcat server. The axis2 web application is installed !. In order to verify the installation, invoke the following URL Axis2 (update the Tomcat port from 8080 accordingly). The following webpage is rendered.



Step 3: Open a DOS window, navigate to the folder where the source distribution of axis2 was downloaded and navigate to the following folder [...]\axis2-1.4-bin\axis2-1.4\samples\quickstartaxiom In this article, we deploy the StockQuoteService shipped with the source distribution of axis2.

Step 4: Type ant generate.service in order to build the service packaged file. Ant can be downloaded here
The StockQuoteService.aar file is created under [...]\axis2-1.4-bin\axis2-1.4\samples\quickstartaxiom\build

Step 5: Navigate to the Axis Homepage mentioned in Step 2. Click on the Administration link.



Step 6: Login into the administration console using admin as the userid and axis2 as the password. Note that this is the default password and can be changed. The explanation of how the change the default password is not explained in this article.



Step 7: Click on the Upload Service link on the top left. Browse to the StockQuoteService.aar service created as part of Step 4. Click on Upload



Step 8: Click on the Available Services link on the left menu. The StockQuoteService can be seen as deployed and in Active status. There are two service operations, the getPrice and update



Step 9: Invoke the following link StockQuoteService in order to obtain a price quote for IBM. The price is returned as 42.0 as this is the default value in the example. This example shows the getPrice service operation being invoked.



Step 10: In order to change the price of the symbol IBM, invoke the following link StockQuoteService Update Price. This example shows the update service operation being invoked with the new price value.

Step 11: Invoke the same link as Step 9 again in order to check the new price value of the IBM symbol. The following response is received.



This article explained the basics of Apache Axis2 installation and administration using an example. Watch this space for Part 2 of this article explaining the installation of the Axis2 stand-alone server.