[ANN]AXIS2-M1 released

[Srinath Perera <he...@gmail.com>]

The Apache Axis2 Team is pleased to announce the first milestone release
of Apache Axis2 and the release is available at http://ws.apache.org/axis2

Downloads:
http://cvs.apache.org/dist/axis/v2.0-M1/axis2-M1-src.zip
http://cvs.apache.org/dist/axis/v2.0-M1/axis2-M1-bin.zip

Release Notes:
http://cvs.apache.org/dist/axis/v2.0-M1/release-notes.html

Overview of Apache Axis2
===========================
Axis2 is an effort to re-design and totally re-implement both Axis/Java and
(eventually) Axis/C++ on a new architecture. Evolving from the now standard
"handler chain" model which Axis1 pioneered, Axis2 is developing a more
flexible pipeline architecture which can yet be managed and packaged in a
more organized manner. This new design acknowledges the maturing of the Web
services space  in terms of new protocols such as WS-ReliableMessaging,
WS-Security and WS-Addressing that are built on top of the base SOAP system.

At the time Axis1 was designed, while it was fully expected that other protocols
such as WS-ReliableMessaging would be built on top of it, there was no
proper extension architecture defined to enable clean composition of
such layers. Thus, one of the key motivations for Axis2 is to provide
a clean and simple environment for extensions like Apache Sandesha and
Apache WSS4J to layer on top of the base SOAP system.

Another driving force for Axis2 is to move away from RPC oriented
Web services towards more document-oriented, message style asynchronous
service interactions. The Axis2 project is centered on a new representation
for SOAP messages called AXIOM (AXIs Object Model). AXIOM consists of two
parts: a complete XML Infoset representation and a SOAP Infoset representation
on top of that. The XML Infoset representation provides a JDOM-like simple
API but is built on a deferred model via a StAX-based (Streaming API for XML)
pull parsing API. A key feature of AXIOM is that it allows one to stop
building the XML tree and just access the pull stream directly; thus enabling
both maximum flexibility and maximum performance. This approach allows us to
support multiple levels of abstraction for consuming and offering Web
services: using plain AXIOM, using generated code and statically data-bound
data types and so on.

At the time of Axis1's design, RPC-style, synchronous, request-response
interactions were the order of the day for Web services. Today service
interactions are much more message-oriented and exploit many different
message exchange patterns. The Axis2 engine architecture is careful to
not build in any assumptions of request-response patterns to ensure that
it can be used easily to support arbitrary message exchange patterns.

--The Apache Axis2 Team