Proposed 0.5 release announcement

[Rob Jellinghaus <ro...@unrealities.com>]

As of a week ago Tuesday, Sam had expressed interest in writing an 0.5 (or
Alpha 1) release announcement for Axis, insofar as he was concerned that
expectation management is crucial for this early release.  Since then, he's
contributed a fair bit of code, but hasn't gotten to the release announcement.

I find myself sitting here this morning wondering, why is this not
something that we can collaborate on?  So in the ever-lovin' open source
spirit of "do it and hope that encourages people to fix it," here's my
proposal for our announcement.  All comments, corrections, criticisms
encouraged.  I recognize that some of this information may well change
before we actually cut an alpha release, but I wanted to at least remove
the "where's the announcement?" roadblock.

I will be updating the Axis home page later today with the FAQ that I
mentioned earlier.

----------------------------------------------------

Axis Alpha Release Announcement

The Axis team announces the <a
href="http://xml.apache.org/axis/releases.html">alpha release</a> of the <a
href="http://xml.apache.org/axis">Axis SOAP library</a>.  (Wondering what
Axis is?  Please see our <a href="xml.apache.org/axis/faq.html">FAQ</a>.)

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 WSDL, XML-RPC, SMTP
- Limited documentation

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

So, why an alpha release?  Some worthwhile properties of this release include:

- Streaming-oriented model for SOAP message parsing (SAX, not DOM)
- Significantly higher performance than Apache SOAP 2.2
- Modular, configurable message handling architecture
- Pluggable transport framework
- Good interoperability with other SOAP implementations
- 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 <a
href="http://xml.apache.org/axis/requirements.html">requirements and status
page</a>.

Sincerely,
The Axis Team

----------------------------------------------------

Have at it.
Cheers,
Rob

Standard Axis performance test?

[Rob Jellinghaus <ro...@unrealities.com>]

I would like to do a bit of benchmarking of Axis prior to the alpha release
(just so we know what to say about it).  What benchmarks have people used
when evaluating Axis performance, especially relative to Apache SOAP?

Cheers!
Rob