How to use Axis CPP

[Vincent Jong <vi...@gmail.com>]

My place of employment is implementing a feature and it requires the
use of the axis soap server.  I'm a QA tester who needs impliment a
service in order to test this feature.  Unfortunately, the developer
of the feature doesn't have any experience with axis either (and no
one else in the company does either) and for now where just using his
simple python script for basic testing.  I've installed axiscpp
according to the documentation on the axis website and have read the
user guide, but I'm still not understanding how all of this works. 
I'm able to browse the samples using http://localhost/axis and can run
the sample clients (ex.  ./calculator div 10 2
http://localhost/axis/Calculator), but I don't understand how this is
working.  If on the http://localhost/axis page, I can click on one the
wsdl links and with a little reworking of the url, I can get
something.  For example, using http://localhost/axis/base?wsdl, I get
a page with a bunch of input boxes.  So, I guess, these are the
following questions I have right now.

1. How does the user interact with axis?  Is it supposed to be done
like in the samples (ie. ./calculator div 10 2
http://localhost/axis/Calculator) ?  Or is it supposed to be accessed
through a browser?  If user interaction should be done through a
browser, how would you set up a service up to do so?

2. What are the basic things I need to know in order to write a
webservice using axiscpp?  Do I still need to get/install other Java
components that are used in the Java version of axis?

If there's anything I missed information-wise, I apologize as I'm
very, very new to axis and webservices in general and I don't know
where to really start off at.  Thank you for your consideration in
this matter.

Vincent