AXIS System Integration Guide

[Russell Butek <bu...@us.ibm.com>]

A couple weeks ago there was a flurry of notes asking about design
documents.  I don't have one of those, but here at IBM we're going to
integrate AXIS into WebSphere, so we're writing what we call an AXIS System
Integration Guide which will define a set of SPIs (as opposed to APIs which
are defined in the specs and user's guide).  We would like to know whether
the AXIS community would find such a document useful.  Here is the skeleton
for this document (if you put it into xml-axis/java/docs, it'll pick up
axis.jpg): (See attached file: integration-guide.html).  We will write
something like this regardless of whether AXIS adopts it, but we believe it
would be much more meaningful if it were part of AXIS.

Some of it has probably already been written; for example, the
architectural overview could contain Glen's MessagePath picture or some
slides that Steve Graham wrote.  The doc outlines the plug points that we
believe are necessary for meaningful integration.  Some plug points already
exist - handlers, logging, encoding - and there are folks more expert than
we are who could do a better job writing about them.  Other plug points are
new ones that we believe are necessary - system management, configuration,
internationalization, performance monitoring - and we will do our best to
present a case for them.  They're necessary for WebSphere.  It's up to the
AXIS community to decide whether they're necessary for AXIS.

A goal of this document is to stabilize a set of interfaces so that we can
do our integration work with a certain level of confidence.

Russell Butek
butek@us.ibm.com