What is AXIS2?

You wouldn't have come here without knowing the answer. Don't curse me, just for the completion, I'll add few words on this & will give more references - so, the people who are interested in knowing more can go in depth.

If you are new to web services or if this is the first time you hear about web services, please do a Google search to find out some introductory articles on web services. It's not surprising, everybody does not supposed to learn about web services - I've met a lot who have not heard about web services while conducting interviews.

So, please bare with me, I am not going to talk about web services from scratch here. But if you are new to AXIS2 and never used it before, this is the best place to start with.

Web services facilitate inter communication between applications written in different languages. A .NET application can talk to another Java application. In doing so XML is the primary means of communication. To put it in a better way, SOAP is the 'protocol' followed in constructing those XML message. To make it simpler, SOAP defines the schema for a message to be sent via web services. To construct & interpret SOAP messages, we need to have SOAP engine. AXIS2 is, such a SOAP engine - and sometime goes beyond the original definition of a SOAP engine.

AXIS2 enables it's users to carry out following tasks.

1. Send SOAP messages
2. Receive and process SOAP messages
3. Create a Web service out of a plain Java class
4. Create implementation classes for both server and client using WSDL
5. Easily retrieve the WSDL for a service
6. Send and receive SOAP messages with attachments
7. Create or utilize a REST-based Web service
8. Create or utilize services that take advantage of the WS-Security, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Addressing, WS-Coordination, and WS-Atomic Transaction recommendations
9. Use Axis2's modular structure to easily add support for new recommendations as they emerge.

Whole set of BUZZ words ah? Nothing to worry about, we'll go through each & every one of them in my future posts. To start with following is a nice tutorial to follow: http://people.apache.org/~thilina/axis2/docs/userguide.html