[SOLVED] SOAP access to the Zimbra server

[JoshuaPrismon]

Originally Posted by fstakem

Has anyone done a SOAP project in java and written something about how to go about this? I have gone through the file Tester.java trying to understand the interface. I was not able to find any jars in the ZimbraServer directory to link to. Where are the jars that are needed to compile a project? I tried including the source but ran out of memory on the heap when doing a compile.

Check out ZimbraStore.jar in ZimbraServer, and the associated jars in ZimbraCommon.

[fstakem]

There is no file ZimbraStore.jar in the zimbraserver directory. I downloaded the source and there is only one jar in the zimbra server directory.

[dkarp]

I gather that you need to build it. Go into the ZimbraServer directory and do an

ant jar

The generated jarfiles should be under ZimbraServer/build.

[AddGun]

can you give me a download link to ZimbraStore.jar instead?

[JoshuaPrismon]

Originally Posted by AddGun

can you give me a download link to ZimbraStore.jar instead?

You are going to need to build your project anyways if you are writing code against it. The ZimbraStore.jar is in the production releases of Zimbra (you can cp it from your actual server version), but if you are having problems getting that to compile, you are going to have problems using the code.

[fstakem]

Well you are making the assumption that everyone uses linux for development so they can simply set up a box and run the install. We are using Linux on the servers, but do development in Windows. Since most of the people who will be working on this with us will be running windows I don't think that is unreasonable.

The ant script is quite large. I went through parts of it but hesitated from making modifications. We need to get the jars to build java apps for any platform. This includes mobile platforms. Can the Java SOAP interface be run on CLDC devices?

[dkarp]

Originally Posted by fstakem

Well you are making the assumption that everyone uses linux for development so they can simply set up a box and run the install. We are using Linux on the servers, but do development in Windows. Since most of the people who will be working on this with us will be running windows I don't think that is unreasonable.

I develop Zimbra on Windows. ant will still run on Windows.

If that doesn't work for you, you can get a prebuilt the zimbrastore.jar file from any of the binary releases.

[crankin]

I whipped together a perl module that makes it really easy to access Zimbra with soap right now it only deals with Calendar actions and appointments, but you can extend it easily with some basic Perl know how. Check out the thread I posted here:

Perl Module to simplify SOAP access to Zimbra

The module is attached to that thread, and a text file on how to use the module.

[jasper]

Probably, the reason WSDL does not exist and does not make sense is that Zimbra HTTP requests/responses do not seem to be web-services to begin with.

A web-service will never respond with a JSON response.

Ofcourse there is a SOAP response as well now (achieved by removing the type="js" from the format element of SOAP request) - but it is not a must. And the SOAP response seems to be added as an after thought (just a guess!).

And, the original request/responses seem to be tuned towards AJAX UI - hence JSON.

[dkarp]

Originally Posted by jasper

Ofcourse there is a SOAP response as well now (achieved by removing the type="js" from the format element of SOAP request) - but it is not a must. And the SOAP response seems to be added as an after thought (just a guess!).

Actually, we started off with vanilla XML SOAP. We later introduced a shim layer (Element.java) so that the SOAP marshalling code could generate either JSON or XML...