WS4D-gSOAP is a framework that assists development of web services on multiple platforms. These includes mobile phones, server, computers or embedded system.

WS4D can run as a standalone application or based upon a server and has been used in many commercial products. Despite being the most prominent framework for embedded system SOAP services, WS4D seems to be lacking behind in version support and documentation. Namely, you cannot build the latest version of WS4D-gSOAP with the latest version of gSOAP, even though both frameworks’ last version were one or two years ago. Development doesn’t seem to be active, so does the community. Finding help is a big hassle!

So, this post outlines some problems i encountered while working with the framework and how to solve them, hoping that the next follower won’t have as much trouble starting in a new environment.

Terminology

It seems that the WS4D documentation assumes that you have a certain level of understanding on Unix-based build system and working across platform. You cannot find definition for several new terminologies used in the documentation, so the docs may be quite confusing and intimidating for new users. I find these words particularly weird:

• In source build: The binaries will be generated inside the same directory as the source. This has the advantage of simplifying the make files as you don’t have to link and copy libraries over, but the directory may look extremely messy.
• Out-of-source build: Separate source and binary directories. This is the configuration used by WS4D tutorial and code. The sample make file in the tutorial already to the hard work and creates the most common directories used in almost all WS4D projects.
• Cross-compile (and compilation): This means instead of compiling only one binary to use on your development platform, it will compile another binary for another platform. What do you do with this second binary is up to you: you can push it to the device or run it in a simulator, but cmake’s job in this case is only generating the binary file for you.
• Tool-chain: A set of compiler and linker for a specific device or platform. Cross-compiling uses two or more tool-chain to generate two or more executable.

Proper version

The documentation for WS4D is a bit disorganized, so it may not relevant for first-time readers that you must compile WS4D with specific versions of gSOAP, doing otherwise will lead to make-errors and build headaches. It is mentioned in Features page (which is not visible from the first page of documentation). I was reading only the installation instruction and tutorial when I started to build the system, so I missed this important fact! How should I know that Getting Started is not a good place to get started?

	ws4d-gsoap 0.7.x	ws4d-gsoap 0.8.x	ws4d-gsoap trunk
gSOAP 2.8.0	Not yet supported	Not yet supported	Not yet supported
gSOAP 2.7.17	Not yet supported	supported with patch	supported with patch
gSOAP 2.7.16	Not yet supported	supported with patch	supported with patch
gSOAP 2.7.15	Not yet supported	Not yet supported	Not yet supported
gSOAP 2.7.14	Not yet supported	Not yet supported	Not yet supported
gSOAP 2.7.13	supported	supported	supported
gSOAP 2.7.12	supported	supported	supported
gSOAP 2.7.11	supported	supported	supported
gSOAP 2.7.10	supported	supported	supported

So the latest version of the stack you can use is gSOAP 2.7.17 with WS4D-gSOAP 0.8. I don’t know why it is so complicated, maybe due to the fact the gSOAP 2.8 also implemented WS-Discovery (a feature overlap with WS4D), and the auther didn’t have enough time to adjust WS4D-gSOAP to the new changes.

Build steps and permissions

Supposed you have decent Linux knowledge, you can use this inside the directory where WS4D-gSOAP was extracted to

1. ./configure
2. ccmake .
3. Edit path to gSOAP directory (the source you downloaded, do not ‘make install’ this)
4. Press g to generate, there may by some warning, ignore them
5. Press c to configure
6. make (I don’t know why this step is needed, but if you misses this step, the next step will result in various errors. This step will result in errors)
7. su -c ‘make’ – (You can’t use sudo, you have to use su with a trialing dash to load root user’s environment. Root permission is required to install binaries to their proper locations)