Developing and debugging web services using axis, eclipse and Tomcat

Introduction

Recently I was reading through SOA and I wanted to develop few services using Axis. Since I was already comfortable with eclipse as j2ee development IDE (I use eclipse 3.4 - Ganymede for development purposes). When I started with axis, I wanted to use eclipse for development of web-services too. I struggled couple of hours googling to find best way to write, debug, deploy and distribute web services.

 

Initially I used Axis2 Codegen Wizard and Axis2 Service Archiver. Initially I got few error dialogs like java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException

 

 

Though I found out way to fix it by adding few jars to the lib folder of the pluggin and modifying the pluggin.xml, it was not really useful as it just generate the required files and there was no possibility I could find to debus the services. Overall, I thought there could be a better way and I googled and finally I would an acceptable way to do development and debug. These are information I put together from my own experience and various sources from internet.

 

Before starting, I want to mention my development environment.