Adding Axis2 webservice programmatically at runtime

I just tried out Axis2 (in version 1.1.1).

But I wanted to embed the AxisEngine into my own web application instead of building an aar and deploying it into the axis2 default web application. One possible way would have been to use the same web application directory layout as used in the axis2 default web app and put a service archive into the WEB-INF/services directory or to package my web application war having the exploded service archive in the WEB-INF/services. Both solutions would have complicated the build process.

So I wanted to add services programmatically at runtime. Perhaps using some annotations on classes which mark them as webservices.

I found code like that:

service = AxisService.createService(
 MyServiceImpl.class.getName(),
 axisConfiguration,
 RPCMessageReceiver.class);
service.setName("MyService");
axisConfiguration.addService(service);
axisConfiguration.startService(service.getName());

But the problem was to get the AxisConfiguration. The solution was simple to extend the AxisServlet which has a reference to the configuration. So MyAxisServlet overrode the init method in the following way...

public void init(ServletConfig config) throws ServletException
{
  super.init(config);
  
  AxisService service;
  try {
    service = AxisService.createService(
      MyServiceImpl.class.getName(),
      axisConfiguration,
      RPCMessageReceiver.class);
    service.setName("MyService");
   
    axisConfiguration.addService(service);
    axisConfiguration.startService(service.getName());      
  } catch (AxisFault e) { 
    e.printStackTrace();
  }
}

...and substituted the default AxisServlet in the web.xml with MyAxisServlet ...and it worked.

At the moment I don't know if I made everything right but I had a webservice running.

The next step was then to change the init method to search all classes having an annotation @Webservice and add them in the same way as above. Name, scope and targetNamespace were set with annotation attributes.

So I have my classes annotated and added automatically to the AxisEngine. When I add another webservice class to my web app the only thing to do is to add the annotation. And I don't need a special build process to build the archive or package my war file.