Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Axis2 1.0 is out and the design approach and feature set sounds impressive. I have not tried it yet, still using Axis 1.2/1.3 and really waiting for official JAX-WS support. TSS has a release post and thread.

One of thg Axis2 contributors elaborates in the thread commentary:

Posted by: Sanjiva Weerawarana

It is true that Axis2 1.0 does not support JAX-RPC/JAX-WS etc..That's not by accident rather by design.

We set out from the beginning to do something that is as clean and innovative as possible without being bound to those JCP specs. Why? Because many people (including us :-)) think that those standards are pretty crappy. See for example Rethinking the Java stack and JAX-WS Sucks.

Axis2 is not your father's Oldsmobile. It takes a very different view of Web services from status quo- it takes the view that Web services is really about XML and not about (Java) objects and has a model which keeps XML around and hands it off to the application directly. IF the application wants to, it can of course bind the XML into a Java object, but that's not in the guts of Axis2.

Furthermore, in Axis2 we recognize that SOAP and WS-* is major overkill for many scenarios: just pumping plain old XML (POX) over HTTP is good enough. So Axis2 supports that natively: the applications are delivered only the XML payload- whether it came over POX or whether it came inside the soap:Body element of a SOAP envelope doesn't make a difference. The extra context is around if the app wants to get it, but SOAP is not pushed on the application. In fact, the SAME application logic can offer both a full REST interface and a SOAP/WS-* interface. A blog entry I recently wrote about that is here.

The DII client API is similarly purely XML centric. Its sort of like XmlHttpRequest, except you can turn on things like WS-Security and WS-Reliable Messaging if you want. If you're happy with POX, then it does that happily too.

The other thing to realize about the JAX-* and other JCP specs is that they're not up to date with the WS-* world. In particular, there are no standard APIs for WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy and so on. So even if you do implement JAX* etc., it buys you little in terms of doing Web services all out. You can of course wait a few more years until all of those JSRs get created and completed or just use Axis2 now.

But, I can certainly understand that if you're a total JCP/J2EE head then this beast will not appeal to you. All we ask is that you try it out and give us your feedback .. its a true open source project with a large community and we welcome your feedback to help improve it.

I should add .. there are others (like IBM) who do care about JCP spec support. So there is indeed an effort to implement JAX-WS etc. on top of the base Axis2 APIs. That effort is currently underway .. but as implied by my writing, I personally don't have much interest in that part. YMMV.

Personally I applaud all the efforts of the ASF and the Axis crews (both) but I will be holding off until actual JAX-WS support is present. Standards do matter when it comes to actual interoperability. Future features of Axis2 are to include the holy grail of a easily exposing (by easily exposing I mean an annotation in existing app code, etc) an object model as a SOAP/WS standard service *AND* as a REST service simultaneously. That will be pretty darn cool and will likely calm at least some of the incessant developer whining that right now emanates from virtually any web services discussion.

UPDATE Axis2 has some concerns to be aware of, not just a rosy design approach as mentioned above.