Axis

Apache Axis is an implementation of the SOAP ("Simple Object Access Protocol") submission to W3C. SOAP is a lightweight protocol for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It is an XML based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined datatypes, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses.

Apache Axis™ is a second generation SOAP engine, the successor to the Apache SOAP project, itself based on the original SOAP4J code that IBM contributed to Apache in April 2000. In contrast to its predecessor, Axis is fully WSDL aware. It also supports the JAX-RPC API.

Apache Axis (Apache eXtensible Interaction System) is an open source, XML based Web service framework. It consists of a Java and a C++ implementation of the SOAP server, and various utilities and APIs for generating and deploying Web service applications. Using Apache Axis, developers can create interoperable, distributed computing applications. Axis is developed under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation.

When using the Java version of Axis there are two ways to expose Java code as Web service. The easiest one is to use Axis native JWS (Java Web Service) files. Another way is to use custom deployment. Custom deployment enables you to customize resources that should be exposed as Web service.