Axis Alpha 2 Release Notes

This is the alpha 2 release of the Axis SOAP library. (Wondering what Axis is? Please see our FAQ.)

General Alpha Information

This is an alpha release, and hence is not feature complete. The main missing features include:

• No support for SOAP attachments
• Deployment syntax not finalized
• Incomplete Apache SOAP 2.2 deployment descriptor support
• Minimal testing in EJB / application server frameworks
• No support for XML-RPC, SMTP
• Limited documentation

The Axis team is working on all of these missing features.

So, why an alpha release?

The Axis code already has:

• Significantly higher performance than Apache SOAP 2.2
• Good interoperability with other SOAP implementations
• A streaming-oriented model for message parsing (SAX, not DOM)
• A modular, configurable message handling architecture
• A pluggable transport framework
• Support for WSDL generation and code generation from WSDL
• An extensive package and functional test suite

Early adopters and advanced SOAP developers will find this release to be of interest. Most Apache SOAP users, and those who need a fully featured next-version replacement for Apache SOAP 2.2, should hold off at least until Axis's beta release. Progress towards that beta release may be viewed on Axis's requirements and status page.

What's New?

Changes since alpha-1:

• Added support for auto-generating WSDL from any URL-accessible service (i.e. JWS services)!
• Added a Wsdl2java tool for building Axis stubs and skeletons from WSDL files!
• SimpleAxisServer now supports HTTP basic authentication
• Revamp authentication handlers to use an extensible "security provider" interface, which should allow easy integration with existing security providers such as those provided by application servers. A basic version and a version which uses servlet 2.2 authentication are both provided.
• The "org.apache.axis.utils.Debug" class is gone, and we now use log4j as our logging / debugging library.
• Many minor bug fixes.