Axis 1.1 used to be the SOAP framework that was integrated with RIFE. The integration was very hackish to say the least since there were no easily replaceable and reusable parts that could be used with another servlet-like gateway in front of it. Since Axis 1.1 doesn't work with Java 5.0, we really had to remove it and either support version 1.2 or use another solution. We decided to move over to XFire and made creating SOAP elements even easier thanks to it.

RIFE version 1.5.1 requires the XFire 1.0 release, later versions support the XFire 1.2 API (as of 1.6 snapshots).

All that's needed to setup a SOAP webservice in RIFE with XFire now are two properties, like this:

<element id="ECHO" extends="rife/soap/xfire.xml" url="/soap" >
    <property name="home-class">com.uwyn.rife.engine.testwebservices.soap.xfire.Echo</property>
    <property name="home-api">com.uwyn.rife.engine.testwebservices.soap.xfire.EchoApi</property>
</element>

The Java source code is very simple:

public class Echo implements EchoApi
{
    public String echo(String value)
    {
        return "I got : '"+value+"'";
    }
}

public interface EchoApi
{
    public String echo(String value);
}

The webservice can be accessed at "http://server/soap" now. To see the WSDL, just fetch "http://server/soap?wsdl".

SOAP services now also support the ElementService interface.