Axis 1, which I might as well call “Mrs. Picky of WSDL parsing which also gives completely delusive error messages” surprised me somewhat today. No, in principle it was not Axis 1 but XFire; I wanted to parse an old service developed for Globus Toolkit 4 – and thus Axis 1 – but received the following error message:

java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: “unbound”

At first I though it was as stupid as the normal Axis 1 exception – “Mystery error” and the like – but then it occurred to me that I once corrected some maxOccurs elements from unbound to unbounded, even though Axis 1 does not seem to mind. Indeed, the error was in the WSDL:

type="vo:VOMemberType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbound">

I have corrected it now, but I wonder why exactly Axis 1 is so lazy and does allow unbound instead of unbounded.

Some time ago I tried to gain some insight into Unicore 6 because the Globus Toolkit is, at best, tedious to use. After some fiddling around, I learnt that for the experiments I wanted to do, WSRFLite would suffice; but trying to implement a service and a client in WSRFLite proved to be more difficult than programming for Globus – in principle, like developing for Globus without Borja Sotomayor’s “The Globus Toolkit 4 Programmer’s Tutorial” -, so I gave it up as it was not pressing at all.

But after the OMII-Training for D-Grid last month I gave it another shot today after I was no longer in the mood to write proposal stuff. And guess what – after a “short” session of about only 4 hours I finally got it to work! From configuration issues to missing documentation, nothing could stop me and now I have a running container, two deployed services (factory and resource) and a working client – in your face, WSRFLite!

When time permits – which may be somewhere from today to in two or three weeks, I’ll write the steps up and provide everything as a documentation.

Edit: You can obtain the documentation from my personal page at HLRS or use this link to download it directly.

Globus Toolkit 4 at its best: