Axis Alpha 3 Release Notes

This is the alpha 3 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:

• 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-2:

• Added a java2wsdl tool for building WSDL from Java files!
• Many enhancement for the wsdl2java JAX-RPC compliant emitter.
• Deployment syntax now finalized using WSDD files.
• Preliminary support for SOAP Messages with Attachments.
• Many minor bug fixes.