Web Tools Platform 0.7 Release - New and Noteworthy for Web Services Tools

Highlights
Below you will find details about enhancements to the Web services tools in 0.7. We have continued to define internal provisional APIs for the Web services frameworks and the command/wizard framework. The APIs in WTP 0.7 are all provisional instead of public because of the extreme youth of the APIs and the lack of any third-party extensions besides Apache Axis to help validate the design of the APIs. As the community begins extending the framework by using those internal provisional APIs, the APIs can be validated, revised and promoted to public in a more appropriate release of the Eclipse WTP.

Here are the highlights of the changes to the Web services tools for 0.7:

  • Support is now available for Axis 1.2.1
  • Tomcat 5.5 server support is now available using JDK 1.5 on Axis 1.2.1.
  • Some early enhancement for the Web Services Explorer to support schema nillable elements and attributes are in. However, the fully support would not be in until later milestones. See defects 98843 and 998844 for details.

Aside from the items listed above, the focus has been on stabilizing existing function since the M5 milestone. Please check the following M5 milestone plans for more detail on the most recent enhancements:

Presentations
The following presentations give an overview of the Web services tools in WTP, the plugins being contributed and the internal provisional APIs.

Tutorials
The following tutorials demonstrate functionality of the Web Services tools in the 0.7 release:

Known Problems
  • Please be aware of the following known problems when using the Web Services tools.  See the associated Bugzilla defect for further details.
    • 85823: When creating a Web service from Java bean, if you specify Generate proxy and Test the Web service, compilation errors may show up in the server console the first time the server is started complaining about "package org.eclipse.jst.ws.util does not exist". This is a timing problem because webserviceUtils.jar, which contains the class org.eclipse.jst.ws.util.JspUtils, is not added to the WEB-INF/lib directory of the Web project in time for the JSP compile. Despite the error, eventually the sample JSPs come up OK and the Web service can be invoked successfully. 
    • 105601: When creating Web service, if you choose Test the Web service, you will need to select Generate Proxy as well. Otherwise, if the client project does not already exist, you may get the message "Error in copying Webservice Utility file". If this happens, you can either create the client project manually before going through the Web service wizard or select/deselect both options together.
    • 105462: When going through the Web services wizard, you might run into an intermitten problem where the error dialog "Errors during build. Resource .deployable does not exist" may pop up. When that happens, just dismiss the dialog and continue.
    • 102117: When creating a Web service, you might get "Error when deploying Web service to Axis runtime" when the component/project containing the Web service had already been added to a started server. The workaround is to restart the server manually before going through Web service wizard.
    • 92429: The Web Services Explorer does not work with the Netscape browser. Change the default Web Browser by using Window -> Preferences -> General -> Web Browser. 
    • 94010: Do not create bottom-up Web services from beans in the default package. Otherwise, you will get "Error in getting method from bean" when going through the Web Service wizard. Instead, put your service bean in a Java package before creating a Web service from it. 
    • 86552: If the service name in the WSDL file used in Web service client scenario does not follow Java naming convention, e.g. having a lowercase first letter, the Proxy class generated by the Web service client wizard may not be able to correctly reference the generated type and may have compile errors. 
    • 99728: The Axis 1.1 runtime included in WTP is configured to support creation of Web services in projects targeted to Apache Tomcat or Geronimo. The Web service wizard will fail with "IWAB0234E An internal error occurred. Details: null java.lang.IllegalArgumentException" if the selected artifact, be it a Java bean or WSDL file, is contained in a project with a runtime target other than Tomcat or Geronimo.
    • 100677, 103198, 105151 : The Geronimo 1.0 Server is enabled for the Web service wizard but not yet fully functional due to these significant defects.
    • 105090: Sample JSP launches with incorrect URL on SLES 9.0 when using the default browser "Konqueror". The workaround is to manualy update the URL starting with "http:/localhost" to "http://localhost".
    • 105611: When running Web services scenarios, you might get a warning in the Tomcat console with the warning that "Attachment support is disabled". This is expected and would not affect the running of the Web service.
    • 105459: When creating Web service using Tomcat 4.1, if the server does not already exist, there may be an intermitten problem of "Error in starting server". The workaround is delete the Tomcat 4.1 server created by the Web service wizard, create a Tomcat 4.1 server manually before launching the Web service wizard.
    • 105089: The Web Service Explorer may run into error opening WSIL files containing Japanese characters. You might get an error indicating that the document "is not a valid WSIL URL or HTML URL" or corrupted characters in the Web Service Explorer WSIL page summary table.
    • 105087: The Web Service Explorer is unable to publish objects with non-English name.
    • 106239: When using the Web Services Explorer with the IBM UDDI Test Registry to add business assertions, you might get an error message stating that the business in not owned by you.
    • 104993: When creating bottom-up Web service, you might get the exception Unexpected exception occured. Detail: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/activation/DataSource. Refer to comment #8 of the defect for detail workarounds instruction.