Deploying JAX-WS RI to Tom Cat

Just some quick notes today on deploying to a JAX-WS RI service to Tomcat. It has to be the RI version as of course Tomcat doesn't have web service support built in. First things first was to edit .../conf/tomcat-users.xml to add a manager account so you can see when deployments go bad. It should look something like this:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<tomcat-users>
  <role rolename="manager"/>
  <role rolename="standard"/>
  <user username="admin" password="tomcat" roles="standard,manager"/>
</tomcat-users>

You can start tomcat in a variety of ways, I prefer "catalina.sh run" as it doesn't start a process in the background. So it is easier to keep an eye on.

Now if you created your RI class in JDeveloper you might find that the sun-jaxws.xml file is created with incorrect deployment descriptors depending on the build of JDeveloper you are using. Make sure the url-pattern and name match the servlet-name and in web.xml.

<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'UTF-8'?>
<endpoints xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jax-ws/ri/runtime" version="2.0">
  <endpoint url-pattern="/Class1Port" implementation="riproject.Class1"
            name="Class1Port"/>
</endpoints>

For comparison the matching web.xml

<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'ISO-8859-1'?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" version="2.5" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee">
    <description>Empty web.xml file for Web Application</description>
    <listener>
        <listener-class>com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.servlet.WSServletContextListener</listener-class>
    </listener>
    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>Class1Port</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.servlet.WSServlet</servlet-class>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>Class1Port</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/Class1Port</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
    ...
</web-app>

When you create a RI web service you do end up with the "JAX-WS RI Web Services" library. This isn't enough to deploy to tomcat, indeed the libraries we are using are modified so they only really make sense when used inside weblogic. Instead you are better of creating a new library from a fresh RI download, make sure you mark as being deployed by default. You could also just add the RI classes to the default classpath for Tomcat, this might make more sense in a production environment.

You can create a connection to your Tomcat instances from the resource pallet in the normal way; but you will find that the web service deployment profile that is created won't allow you to deploy to your new connection.

This is because our profiles default to weblogic as there deployment platform. If you clear this value as in the following screen grab you can then use this deployment profile on tomcat.

If all goes well in deployment you should find that you service is deployed properly, you can monitor this at the default manager URL http://localhost:8080/manager using the password we defined earlier.