How to set up a working Axis2/C development environment

The full Axis2/C development environment requires the Axis2/C bundle, and some Java libraries if you want to generate sources/interfaces. The Java libraries can be found in the Axis2/Java package, so the best is if you download and install both bundles.

Environment variables

First, we set up the required environment variables (customize them if needed). The safest is if you set them for the runtime environment as well.

# The desired root of the Axis2/C installation
AXIS2C_HOME=$PWD/axis2_c
export AXIS2C_HOME
# The desired root of the Axis2/Java installation
AXIS2_HOME=$PWD/axis2_java
export AXIS2_HOME
# The Axis2/C runtime libraries
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$AXIS2C_HOME/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
# JAVA_HOME: this is the SLC4 distribution default, change it if needed
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
export JAVA_HOME
PATH=$PATH:$AXIS2C_HOME/bin/tools/wsdl2c
export PATH

Download and compile Axis2/C

wget http://apache.mirror.testserver.li/ws/axis2/c/1_5_0/axis2c-src-1.5.0.tar.gz
tar -zxf axis2c-src-1.5.0.tar.gz
mkdir -p $AXIS2C_HOME
pushd axis2c-src-1.5.0
./configure  --prefix=$AXIS2C_HOME --enable-openssl=yes
make
make install
popd
chmod +x $AXIS2C_HOME/bin/tools/wsdl2c/WSDL2C.sh

Obtain Axis2/Java

Now, you have two options: download the latest Axis2/Java official release or download and build it form the Apache Subversion repository. You should consider the Subversion method if you want to develop servers in Axis2/C with custom SOAP fault, because the latest release contains code generation support for the custom faults. The previous sentence was valid when I created this document, and the latest official Axis2/Java version was 1.4.1. The fault support appeared in the sources on 9 February, 2009.

Method 1: Obtain the latest Axis2/Java release

wget http://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/apache/dist/ws/axis2/1_4_1/axis2-1.4.1-bin.zip
unzip axis2-1.4.1-bin.zip
mv axis2-1.4.1 $AXIS2_HOME

Method 2: Build Axis2/Java from Apache Subversion repository

To build Axis2/Java, you need Subversion and Ant installed as well as a Java development environment (version > 1.4) with JAVA_HOME set properly.

You need to download Apache Maven as well.

export MAVEN_HOME=$PWD/apache-maven-2.0.9
export PATH=$MAVEN_HOME/bin:$PATH
wget http://mir2.ovh.net/ftp.apache.org/dist/maven/binaries/apache-maven-2.0.9-bin.tar.bz2
tar -jxf apache-maven-2.0.9-bin.tar.bz2

Now, we can build Axis2/Java (will take a while...)

svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/webservices/axis2/trunk/java $AXIS2_HOME
pushd $AXIS2_HOME
mvn clean install

-- ZsoltMolnar - 06 Feb 2009