Container and Thread Relationships in Axis

[Paul Monday <pm...@attbi.com>]

Hi all,

I'm working on a book about Web Services and I'm using Axis for the Web
Services platform.  It plays a secondary roll in the book, though I find
myself leaking some information about Axis in, especially around deployment
and how it processes a Web Service request.

I'm stuck on an execution scenario and I was hoping I could get some help
here.  As far as I can tell, each service implementation is loaded by its
own class loader and I suspect that each implementation runs in its own
thread (not first-class process).  The thread probably gets started by the
transport listener as it gets to a request handler but I can't tell for
sure...I just started parsing code.

If I were to draw a simplified deployment diagram using boxes for threads, I
believe I would have
Outer: Tomcat:Thread (Container)
Middle:  Axis:Thread (Container)
Inside: Service Runner:Thread
Inside the Service Runner, an object that denotes the instantiation of the
service class.

So, my questions are...
- Is there a better word for the service runner used in Axis?
- Are the thread relationships correct?
- Who originates the thread that runs the service, is it the transport
listener or a request handler?

That's it.

I do have a suggestion...that some information like this gets added to the
architecture document.  It seems this would be invaluable for someone to get
involved in the code.

Paul B. Monday
pmonday@attbi.com
Apress!