Configurating Tomcat and SOAP for Web Services

Alternative to the purely Sun-flavoured way, Tomcat and SOAP can be used to build web services. There is a tutorial page 
one can follow (http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-peer2/). Besides the instructions on that page, there is 
something more to be taken care of, in particular, the configuration as well as the versions of those softwares. 

To start with, there are three software packages to be downloaded and unpacked (no installation required, therefore can 
be extracted and stored anywhere). Please be careful with downloading the correct versions, espacially the version for 
Tomcat. It is known that Tomcat 5 or later versions might generate unexpected errors and needs further configuration.

   1. jakarta-tomcat-3.3.2 (http://archive.apache.org/dist/jakarta/tomcat-3/v3.3.2/bin/jakarta-tomcat-3.3.2.zip)
   2. soap-2.3.1           (http://apache.sunsite.ualberta.ca/ws/soap/version-2.3.1/soap-bin-2.3.1.zip)
   3. xerces-1.2.3         (http://archive.apache.org/dist/xml/xerces-j/old_xerces1/Xerces-J-bin.1.2.3.zip)

Go to the tutorial page (http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-peer2/) and proceed with it until the part to 
edit tomcat.bat, then follow instructions here instead of there:

1) search for the following string:
      set CLASSPATH=%TOMCAT_INSTALL%\lib\tomcat.jar;%TOMCAT_INSTALL%\lib\common\commons-logging-api.jar

then insert the existing %CLASSPATH% variable before those two jar files, as follows:
      set CLASSPATH=%CLASSPATH%;%TOMCAT_INSTALL%\lib\tomcat.jar;%TOMCAT_INSTALL%\lib\common\commons-logging-api.jar


2) download and extract out antoher two jar files mail.jar and activation.jar from the following zip file:
(http://www.xmethods.com/download/quickstart/quickstart.zip)

add the local paths to those two jars to the system %CLASSPATH%.


3) add the path to servlet.jar, say C:\jakarta-tomcat-3.3.2\lib\common\servlet.jar, to the system %CLASSPATH%.

4) check the system variable %JAVA_HOME%. If it doesn't exist, set it to the JDK installation path, say C:\jdk1.5.0_04.

Now it is safe to continue with the "Finally" configuration part in the tutorial (i.e., the two lines above Listing2).