Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I have had a run in or two with the "bunch of Sri Lankan shirtlifters" that created Axis2. The entire premise of the thing they have been pushing in various articles just irks me, start from schema, generate code. Maybe it is just me, because honestly there are many other purveyors of this sentiment as well, but I do not want to write an XML file and generate code from that. Rather, I want to start from code, and have it generate a schema and WSDL (much more the direction of JAX-WS, granted though, both can go either direction, but the focus is wrong in Axis2 land). In the days when Java could not specify things like "minOccurs" or "unique", or other concepts that could be expressed in schema, the notion of "start from schema" was semi-valid - but those days were years ago at this point. Currently, you can define an interface, in Java, with annotations, and specify just about anything (well, anything I have come across needing to specify, there may still be gaps, but this is never the reasonining I hear from the "schema first" crowd, usually it is more of " well webshpere . . . " at which point I stop listening).

In addition to just not being on board with the premise of Axis2, I have also seen many Axis2 posts that sure smelled like astroturfing, in terms of why it is so great and what its benchmark numbers are.

Turns out, there may be something to that smell: http://jroller.com/page/fate?entry=dodgy_benchmarks.

Now, it is despicable when companies spit out their own favorable benchmarks, true, but is it unexpected? This seems to happen all over the place. Also, in minor defense of Axis2 under the scope of the Jordanian Pilot's piercing insight, Hani is a committer at Xfire (he has every right to criticize the Axis2 manipulation, but everyone should keep in mind that he has his own bias as well - whether or not he is capable of managing it better). The best part of all of it though, regardless, is that Hani posts are funny again.

Oh, and I do prefer Xfire over Axis, any version of Axis. Props are in order to the Xfire team, including the turd burgling bile blogger. (And to those that said "use Java 6" in the comments on the bile blog, if what you meant was use JAX-WS, the Sun ref impl, then be advised that Xfire has an early access impl of JAX-WS too - http://xfire.codehaus.org/JAX-WS.)