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.