Getting started with AXIS2: setting up AXIS2 in your local machine

In this post I describe how to set up Axis2 in your local machine. Axis2 is a free & open source SOAP processing engine by apache software foundation. You may visit projects home page for more information regarding Axis2.

First of all you have to checkout the latest Axis2 source from the trunk, using a subversion client. I'm working on a GNU/LINUX platform & I use command line client for subversion. If you are a windows user you may use tortoise for that purpose. Go to the place where you want the source to be downloaded, in my case its ~/myProjects/axis2. Then type,

svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/webservices/axis2/trunk/java

It will take some time to download the source files for the first time. After a successful download upon the source we have to build the source. Axis2 uses maven2 as its build framework. You have to install maven2 in your machine to proceed & for installation info refer to maven home page

Now navigate to the top level directory of the source structure, in my case its ~/myProjects/axis2/java & do a clean install using the command,

mvn clean install

You should see the build successful message upon a complete build. If you are getting build errors and cannot resolve them of your own, get help from the Axis2 mailing list. They are quite friendly and willing to help you.

After a successful build you will find snapshot jar of the Axis2 in the target directory under top level Axis2 directory.

All this is fine, but if you need to develop axis2 you should be able to run/debug Axis2 runtime within a IDE to get the maximum use out of it. In my next post I will describe how to run Axis2 within your IDE.