One of my duties at Aspera is developing the SOAP-based web services that are offered as part of our SDK. To that end, I’ve recently been rewriting our services in order to utilize Axis2/C, which, in my opinion, is one of the best architected open source SOAP stacks.
Like most SOAP frameworks, Axis2/C makes heavy use of dynamic libraries and XML configuration files, which need to be maintained properly on disk. Server-side, this does not pose a problem. However, when deploying client applications to a potentially large user base, ensuring that everything is configured properly can cause support headaches.
In an effort to solve that problem, I’ve developed a static deployment engine for Axis2/C. This engine allows all services, modules, and configuration to be compiled directly into a binary. Today, an initial revision of that code was released as open source.
I’m hopeful that the community is interested in this code, and that it will be accepted into the Axis2/C project, where it can be properly maintained going forward. The current incarnation was developed against the 0.95 release, and there are known issues when attempting to build against the trunk of the repository.
I started a couple of threads on the developer mailing list to discuss the effort. In the first, sent yesterday, I announced my work and submitted a minor patch to fix a build issue on Windows. I followed that up today, with a description of an issue I encountered when attempting to bring my modifications in line with the latest revision.
That issue prompted me to release the code, even though it is in an incomplete state. Doing so allows other contributors to the project a chance to review the code, hopefully increasing the probability of its adoption by the project.
I encourage any interested developers to take a look at the code. It is distributed under the same license as Axis2/C, the Apache License, Version 2.0. Feedback is appreciated, and questions can be directed my way.
Source Distribution: axis2-static-deploy.tar.gz
