Writing a deployment-free handler

["Fernandez Martinez, Alejandro" <a....@ibermatica.com>]

Hi folks!

We are entering the wonderful world of Web Services, and we are successfully
using GLUE right now. However, for licensing and other issues we would like
to use an open-source solution, and Axis looks our best bet right now.

However, in one respect Axis lacks the desired functionality: we would like
to be able to make our web services available without having to deploy them.
The jws feature is alright, but does not fulfill our needs either -- we want
to provide the services via our own objects, without having Axis instantiate
them.

The idea is to be able to programmatically publish any object, with the name
we desire. So, it seems that a Handler would be the way to go. Then again,
the code is a bit mangled and hard to read. For example, is the method
Handler.canHandleBlock() used at all? After a text search in the code, it
always seems to return false.

By the way, if we ever get to make it work, would it be useful to anybody
else?

Un saludo,

Alex Fernández.