I think we need Axis2 "Lite Edition"
>> Sunday, May 04, 2008
Last week I was desperate on a particular instrument on eBay and I was bidding like crazy. There were only one more person on this and I wanted to bid at the last 10 secs so that I could get it without increasing the price so much.
Since this was a trivial task, I searched for softwares to do this, and I saw couple of people earning money selling these software.
Interestingly eBay provides a Web services API, which anyone can use to write a tool like that. I wanted to write this as a light weight Swing application, but I wanted to use Axis2 for this. When I looked at Axis2 distro, I was not happy with it, coz we have lots of jars inside our distro which our code was dependingupon. If I am writing a software like eBay trader, which will run on some ones desktop, may it be a small webstart app or a swing app, it should be light weight.
To send bit of SOAP messages, I don't want to have 20 odd jars, especially if this app becomes a webstart app. So I think its the time to start thinking about Axis2 lite edition, which can be used at these sorts of cases. Yes, Axis2 can be for real pros, who needs real B2B stuff and yes Axis2 supports them without any trouble.
But wait .. it should be able to help me with these also. I think Axis2 should come as a lite edition, with max of 5 jars in total, which will help to do these sorts of apps. I think I proposed on minimal jar distro to Axis2 list, but I didn't see any movement towards that. Perhaps I think some one might tell me "thanks for volunteering". Yes I am willing to do that, but I didn't see any energy with others on this. People realize lots of flaws in software that they develop, when they become users of their own software. Sometimes it is a pain even for them to "eat their own dog food".
(BTW, I won that item, bidding at the last 5 secs. Fortunately the other person was not using any software for bidding :) )

2 comments:
I'm certainly interested in your thoughts... specifically what you think is necessary in a 'lite' edition?
Personally I think we could/should ship a lite version without any databinding support, but I'm not sure I'd win that discussion.
Thanks David for agreeing in to this.
I am not sure about what sort of databinding support we will need. Perhaps we can use a dynamic client or we will be better off using something like XMLBeans to get code generated. We might be able to host a service in Apache itself, which will generated code, given a WSDL and the user will be able to download them. This way, he will have less hassle generating code.
But generated code will add those classes and xbean jars. But I prefer to have minimum jars as a whole. Axis2 might give one or two. HTTPClient will add one. axiom will add one or two. And thats it. If we use ADB, then we might not need to use XMLBeans.
I think we need to talk about this in axis-dev.
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