Building Real Applications with Axis

["Rosenfeld, Gary" <Ga...@ca.com>]

Hi, everybody.

I'm very new to the Soap world, so my questions may have some obvious answers, 
but here they are anyway.
 
I'm trying to find out how to use Axis to handle real application issues. An application
I'm talking about will consist of many webservices. And, as we know it, an application
webservice (I call it AWS) will be reperesented by a Java class with some of its methods
exposed to any Soap Client (not neccessary Axis). 
Unfortunately, the user guide and other piblications do not go to much beyond HelloWorld.
The issues I'm interested in particular, are: 
1. Application level authentication
2.Communicating application errors back to a client.

To resolve the 1st issue, I think a message envelope header can be used. It can hold an
encrtipted value (a signature) of user/password/session-id data that the Login AWS 
returns to a client first time, and then every other AWS should be able to use this
signature, thus avoiding an overhead of passing this signature as an argument to every
AWS method. Also, it will allow to use this or a similar signature in other services.  
The question is how to get access to the header data in the AWS java class.    

The 2nd issue is an opposite one. How to pass data back to a client without using a return value.
For example, a AWS encountered an error, it will set return code to indicate an error happend,
but it also needs to pass an error contents as an array of strings, or a buffer, back to a Soap client.
My first choice will be to use the SOAP Fault Element of the message body. 
How can I populate it in a AWS, so it will be accessable by a Soap Client on a return from 
the invoke().

I really appreciate any advices, references, samples, ideas, whatever you can contribute.
Hope it help many others to build successfull webservices.

Regards,

Gary Rosenfeld.