Sunday, July 5, 2009

GSOC: Problems faced during development

Earlier I said that I would be writing a blog post on the problems which I encountered during the development phase of my GSoC project. Here I am compiling them to a list. Some points in the list may not directly be problems but important things which came across during the process.

1. Had a problem with building axis2. This was overcome when I found a workaround for this. (This was a hard issue to regenerate because this will only happen occasionally.)

2. There were lot of dependencies inside axis2's code generation framework. Some dependencies were not set by the build script. Therefore had to manually add the dependencies and run the code. When it gives a compilation error stating a dependency is not there, had to set the dependencies. This took some time :).

3. Had to take some time to understand the existing code base and the architecture of the code generation framework.

4. Learned to work with XSLTs.

5. Another important point to note is that the WSF/Jython distribution, now needs some additional libraries to successfully run. You may have wondered "why is this happening?". As you may already know WSF/Jython is built on top of Apache Axis2. The new releases of Axis2 are having more dependencies towards other liblaries/jars (eg. wsdl4j, etc). Since I no longer work for WSO2, I do not have the access writes to change the build script for WSF/Jython. As soon as I get there, I would remember to revise the build script. Until then you could do a small workaround:)

Download Axis2 standard binary distribution. Then extract it. Add the jars which are residing in the lib folder, to the classpath. Then you could carry on with your work.

6. How to integrate this project to the existing WSF/Jython development. (I will present my arguments on this on a new post)


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