Has anyone put axis web services back in Sakai 11? (a.k.a. There's no school like the old school)

[Mike Osterman]

We're finally working on getting our Sakai 2.9 upgraded to Sakai 11, and have hit a bit of a snag in our timeline: "axis" was removed from the webservices project for Sakai 11 in favor of "cfx": https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-28043

I've read up in the archives, and I didn't find any known security issues. It seems this was done mostly for modernization. While this make sense, the timeline we're targeting doesn't allow time to upgrade our webservice clients and the custom axis webservices we built.

To that end, has anyone done this? If not, is it rational to expect to be able to check out the axis bits from https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/webservices/branches/sakai-10.x/ and expect it to build and work?

Thanks,

Mike

P.S. Speaking of tight timelines, I was glad to find that linktool has an 11.x version as well! https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/linktool/branches/sakai-11.x/

[Matthew Jones]

Well the biggest reasons were

- Axis hadn't been updated in 12 years, the last release was in 2006

NEWS (April 22, 2006): Axis 1.4 Final is now available!

- If you were restarting the webservice when it was being accessed it required a reboot of the server. This happened to us really often as we replace webservices live.

- I believe we had them available in Sakai 10 and removed them in master for 11. ;)

I haven't heard of anyone using the old axis code in 11. It probably would need some code updates and is quite out of date. If you took the commit before when it was removed https://github.com/sakaiproject/sakai/commit/c13e863 it would probably be the best. in git you can easily branch or pull changes from anywhere.

These were the tips from John Bush to possibly help upgrading too. 

https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-25678?focusedCommentId=186616&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-186616

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[Mike Osterman]

11 years since the latest release? That’s not ancient, it’s vintage. What’s old is new again! :)

Thanks for the pointer to John Bush’s comment. I’ll take a look and see what the trade-off of this versus trying to get axis working will be. I also see from that thread that I have Stephen and company to thank for the 11.x upgrade of Linktool. That’s one less thing to do to make our upgrade target!

-Mike

[jeffrey.miller.ctr]

Hi Mike,

Yes, I have (for reasons beyond my control!) resurrected it for Sakai 11. A quick tweak and rebuild of Apache Axis 1.4 using Java 8 is all that is really required. The new jar would then be needed to be installed before building.

With the fix, you'll then see this in the logs:

04-Jan-2018 14:03:16.947 INFO [http-bio-8443-exec-43] org.apache.axis.components.compiler.Javac.compile Using modified axis for jdk 8 compiler

I can send you the jar or instructions on how to build ... 

I've been using Axis on our Sakai 11 instance for almost 2 years now ...

BTW, I just dug out my old JIRA on this topic and here's a useful tidbit:

So, even though axis is 'old' technology, I've ported our Sakai 10 axis web services to Sakai 11, something I said I wouldn't do, oh well. The caveat is this requires a new axis-1.4.jar which supports Java 8, which I've gone ahead and built. Here's an interesting article: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27965823/tools-jar-missing-but-only-on-the-very-first-call-tomcat-8-java-8-axis

[Stephen Marquard]

Hi Mike,

For running LinkTool specifically in 11.x, here's a CXF version of SakaiSigning:

http://source.cet.uct.ac.za/svn/sakai/src_mods/trunk/webservices/cxf/src/java/org/sakaiproject/webservices/SakaiSigning.java

It needs to be declared in:

webservices/cxf/src/resources/applicationContext.xml

e.g. http://source.cet.uct.ac.za/svn/sakai/src_mods/trunk/webservices/cxf/src/resources/applicationContext.xml

Though if you're restoring Axis for jws, then you wouldn't need this.

Regards

Stephen

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From: saka...@apereo.org <saka...@apereo.org> on behalf of Mike Osterman <oste...@whitman.edu>
Sent: 04 January 2018 01:38 AM
To: Sakai Development
Subject: [sakai-dev] Has anyone put axis web services back in Sakai 11? (a.k.a. There's no school like the old school)

 

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[Mike Osterman]

Thanks, Stephen!

I saw your comment with this in the Jira ticket Matthew originally linked to and was all set to go this route, but then remembered one of our LinkTool use cases hooks into a code base for which I'm without developers right now, so as you suggest, I'm in the mode of restoring Axis.

I'm pretty certain that I'll be able to use LinkTool 11.x (thank you again for that!) and Jeffrey Miller's backported axis and it's SakaiSigning.jws to get the job done.

Cheers,

Mike

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