Installation

To install JibxSoap, just download the distribution zip file and unpack it. This will create a jibxsoap directory that contains the distribution files, including a complete copy of this documentation in the /doc directory. The /build directory provides the full JibxSoap source and the actual Ant build file, while the /example directory contains the example application (with its own separate build file). The jibx-soap.jar file containing the compiled JibxSoap code is in the /lib directory.

To build JibxSoap, either from the distribution or from a CVS image, you'll first need to define environmental variables on your system for the root directory of your actual JiBX distribution ("JIBX_ROOT") and the root directory of your Tomcat installation ("TOMCAT_ROOT"). If you use a web server other than Tomcat you'll need to modify the build.xml to reflect your actual system. With these environmental variables set you can use the Ant build.xml file in the /build directory to do the actual build. The default Ant task just rebuilds the /lib/jibx-soap.jar file from the source code. The "distrib" task builds the actual distribution zip file, while the "develop" task builds the /lib/jibx-soap.jar file along with internal JavaDocs.

The "settracking" task can be used to enable statistics collection for services. When set, the JibxSoap server handling tracks the number of requests made to each service, along with the total request and response XML message sizes. The accumulated statistics can be viewed through a web browser by a request to the service location with "?STATS" appended (just as "?WSDL" is used to view the WSDL for a service), which also clears the accumulated statistics. As currently implemented this feature can considerably reduce performance, and it is not intended for use in production systems. The "cleartracking" task disables statistics collection. Distribution builds are always constructed with the feature disabled.

The example application includes its own /build directory and Ant build file (/example/build/build.xml, from the JibxSoap root directory). The "build-client" Ant target builds the client side of the application, "build-server" the server side (creating a war file at /example/JibxSoapExample.war), and "run" executes the actual client application. The default target is "full", which invokes "build-server" followed by "build-client". In order to run the client successfully you'll need to have first deployed the application war file to a server running on port 8080 (the default for Tomcat). The /example/run.sh script gives another way of running the client application, as is used for performance testing comparisons with other frameworks.