ANNOUNCE: Apache Axis alpha-1 release

[Glen Daniels <gd...@macromedia.com>]

[EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:  Axis, a new Java SOAP engine from Apache, in now in
alpha release.  It's fast, it's ultra-flexible, and it's not done yet :),
but we'd love you to "kick the tires" and let us know what you think.]

Hi all:

The Apache Axis team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of Axis!
As it is an alpha, it will be subject to a lot of changes before the final
version goes out the door.  It's not as polished as we'd like, nor is it
likely bug-free, but what's there works well, and we'd love for you to check
it out.

For those who don't know, Axis is the 3rd generation of the Apache SOAP Java
toolkit, and is a completely different architecture from the orginal
DOM-based code.  The parsing is completely SAX based, and as such has
significant performance improvements (over 4X faster than SOAP 2.2 on some
machines!) over the 2.X code.  Axis also tends to interoperate with other
SOAP implementations a bit better, and does more intelligent guesswork about
typing, etc. (more improvements will happen in this area in the coming weeks
as well)

Axis includes user-friendly features such as "drop-in" deployment (drop a
specially-named Java source file into your webapp directory and access the
class as a Web Service instantly!), an easy-to-use client API, and an
intuitive SOAP envelope object model.

A lot of work is going to go into making this package more usable before the
final release, and we're going to be adding such features as:

* Support for the SOAP attachments spec
* WSDL support
* Logging/debugging with the standard log4j library
* Better support for embedding Axis inside applications servers or other
apps
* More substantive documentation

So pick up the alpha, give it a try, and keep your eye on the project for
lots more good stuff soon.

WHERE TO FIND IT:

Source and binary distributions are available at
http://xml.apache.org/axis/dist/alpha1

WHERE TO SEND COMMENTS:

mailto:axis-user@xml.apache.org

Thanks on behalf of the whole team.

Glen Daniels
Macromedia
http://www.macromedia.com/
                                Building cool stuff for web developers