AXIS Overview
Introduction
Axis is essentially a SOAP engine - a framework for constructing SOAP processors such as clients, servers, gateways, etc. The current version of Axis is written in Java, but a C++ implementation of the client side of Axis is being developed. It was developed by IBM and later treaten up on Apache Group for further development.
AXIS Key Features
- Speed. Axis uses SAX (event-based) parsing to acheive significantly greater speed than earlier versions of Apache SOAP.
- Flexibility. The Axis architecture gives the developer complete freedom to insert extensions into the engine for custom header processing, system management, or anything else you can imagine.
- Stability. Axis defines a set of published interfaces which change relatively slowly compared to the rest of Axis.
- Component-oriented deployment. You can easily define reusable networks of Handlers to implement common patterns of processing for your applications, or to distribute to partners.
- Transport framework. We have a clean and simple abstraction for designing transports (i.e., senders and listeners for SOAP over various protocols such as SMTP, FTP, message-oriented middleware, etc), and the core of the engine is completely transport-independent.
- WSDL support. Axis supports the Web Service Description Language, version 1.1, which allows you to easily build stubs to access remote services, and also to automatically export machine-readable descriptions of your deployed services from Axis.
by Simon Zambrovski
