OK so it's been a while since I wrote anything. I am in the processing of getting Leopard installed on a MacBook Pro. Java 6 from Apple actually caused the "upgrade."

We have been running Ubuntu on a fairly wide variety of hardware including some Macs. Actually we're dual booting the Macs so we can keep an eye on how our project has been moving along on multiple platforms. It's a Java Swing app which ultimately has to run on Windows, Linux and OS X. Now that Java 6 is out (at least something usable), we can test and, as it turns out, develop on OS X as well.

That's all well and good now.

The main reason for the post is actually Eclipse and the WTP. One thing that bugs me about the WTP is the dreaded "IWAB0489E Error when deploying Web service to Axis runtime axis-admin failed with {http://xml.apache.org/axis/}HTTP (404)/s1/services/AdminService"

This is certainly not new and I have read where the "fix" is to wait and try again. I find that if you create web services which have a significant number of methods, you increase the chances that this "fix" won't work. Generally speaking turning off "Build Automatically" will take care of this issue. If you decide to do this make sure you do a clean/build before creating any web services and remember to turn "Build Automatically" back on if that's your preference as it is mine.

OK but that's still not exactly the reason for the post. Getting back to the MacBook Pro, I was in the process of checking out some Eclipse projects from a CVS repository. These projects were originally created as "Dynamic Web Projects" so that we could build some web services. Sometimes when you're involved with a relatively complex project (at least from the IDE's perspective) you're not exactly sure what the ramifications of committing (or not committing) certain files might be. I try to ere on the side of I don't what OS other developers might prefer, I have no idea where they might store any third party libraries, and finally I can't answer why some of these issues are so important to some of us and not so much to others. (I certainly have opinions and what I think are best practices but we need to get along.)

For example when I check out one of these projects, I don't get the entire "WebContent" folder. (This actually comes under the heading of don't check in what the environment can and will build for you.) Fortunately, most of it gets rebuilt when you create the first web service. What apparently does not get created and causes the same error I mention above, are web.xml and server-config.wsdd files which are stored in WebContent/WEB-INF. I recall looking this up a while back but I don't recall getting anywhere. This post reminds me I need to check again ; there may be some good reason for this but I can't think of one at the moment.

I get around this problem by copying these two files from another Dynamic Web Project. In general, when I create a new workspace in which I plan to build web services, I always build a little "Hello World" test web service. That way I'm sure there's nothing I have forgotten about (such as Tomcat configuration or the like). I have also found that creating the little test app (and seeing it work) generally keeps my from chasing my tail on a larger more important project.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

ClassCastException: JAXB

Minishift on HyperV

Parallel to Lincoln's angry letters never sent concept...