As a follow up to the "HTTP Connection Hang" discussion and my "SOTimeout" post on axis-user here a few thoughts:
Some broken load balancers in our network configuration caused hanging connections calling WebServices using Axis Clients (1.1RC2). Since the generated Axis Client Code does not set a default socket timeout the calling thread was blocking forever, something which wasn't as obvious as it could be. A default socket timeout would have been wonderful ;) With the current client code I am unable to set the socket timeout directly, so I need to alter the generated code to set a socket timeout for the underlying HttpSender. You may argue easy to fix, but there is another problem: The client code throws RemoteExceptions (and AxisFaults) only, so I am unable to treat local and remote failures differently. Analyzing Axis fault Strings isn't the best way to implement Exception handling. I am somewhat short on time and thus being said I hope someone else might be able to implement the following changes ;(. 1. Set default socket timeout for Axis Clients to 30 or 60 seconds. 2. Generate code which allows to set the socket timeout for the axis client easily. 3. Add a local exception (IOException?) to the exposed web service operations to allow better handling of local (socket) exceptions. I think 1 & 2 should be easy to fix, but 3 will break backwards compatibility. Jens
