What is Lombok? Lombok is a Web Service Container. It runs web services, faster than some of the alternatives and is much easier to configure and use. It will also be more fully featured in the future

What is a Web Services Container A web service is any online service that uses standard XML technologies including SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. A web service container is a server that will run these services. The services must be deployed in a specified directory structure. For more details on this structure please see the user's guide.

Why would I use Lombok over other options like Axis on another server? Lombok is a complete solution, including a light weight server and a slightly modified version of Axis from the Apache project. This means that, in most cases, it will run faster than Axis running on something like Tomcat. It is also much easier to install and configure Lombok than Axis, due to the fact that it is a complete solution. In the future, Lombok will also contain several features to improve ease of use and development.

Won't mulitple features tie users into Lombok? Wherever possible, any extra features of Lombok will not tie users into using Lombok. Sometimes, however, the use of some features will inevitably require the use of Lombok specific configuration or APIs. Part of the design goals for Lombok is to keep this to a minimum - we are not interested in trying to restrict users choices to force them to use Lombok.

Why can't I get my web services to work with Lombok? Because it's not finished yet! :-) This is only just round the corner however, watch this space - and, of course, you could always contribute to the project to speed it's development

How can I get involved? look at this page for details

Where is the source code? The source code is included in the download. The lombok source is in lombok.jar. For source code for any modifed third party classes, these will be included in the relevant jar files - e.g. axis.jar. These will be the only java source files in these jars. For the original source code to these projects go to the relvant web site.

How do I install Lombok? Simply unzip the download file into the appropriate place. You then have two options:

• set LOMBOK_HOME environment variable to point to your Lombok instalation directory
• Pass in the path of your Lombok installation directory to the relevant startup script. For example on Unix this might look like:

  ./lombok.sh ~/servers/lombok-x.x/