Apache Axis2 is a revolutionary web service tool as it enhances online experience of users by faster processes of application. This web service tool has been launched in 2004 and was treated as an improved version of the original Axis. Although Axis1 has the ability to provide the expected functions, the rapid development of online applications can easily stress Axis1 which will result to lack of improved performance.

Through Apache Axis2, developers will increase the speed of their online application as it uses StAX. Axis1 uses SAX which is fast in itself but StAX provides something even better in terms of speed in processing. Another key difference is the use of SOAP and REST while the previous version only accepts SOAP.

Axis2 has also widened its services for developers. The pervious version could work as a tool for web services but Axis2 could do even more. Aside from being a core for web services, Axis2 could be implemented as the server for different web services. Instead of being the controller of online applications alone, it has become a powerful storage facility for different online applications.

This tool for web services is available in Java and C. As of this writing, it’s already on version 1.4 (From 0.93). Axis2 could be implemented in any operating system.

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Looking into Axis2 Flexibility and extensibility are two main design criteria that software designers would like to have in their applications. When it comes to Axis2 its architecture is extremely flexible and extensible. Axis2 has a modular architecture. In this chapter we will learn more about Axis2 architecture its core components and its main...
Core Modules XML Processing Model Managing or processing the SOAP message is the most difficult part of the execution of a message. The efficiency of message processing is the single most important factor that decides the performance of the entire system. Axis1 uses DOM as its message representation mechanism. However Axis2 introduced...
XML Processing Model As mentioned in Chapter 1 Axis2 is built on a completely new architecture as compared to Axis 1.x. One of the key reasons for introducing Axis2 was to have a better and an efficient XML processing model. Axis 1.x used DOM as its XML representation mechanism which required the complete object hierarchy corresponding to incoming...
Information Model As shown in the figure below the information model consists of two hierarchies Description hierarchy" and Context hierarchy" . The Description hierarchy represents the static data that may come from different deployment descriptors. If hot deployment is turned off then the description hierarchy is not likely...
Client API Nowadays asynchronous or non-blocking Web Service invocation is a key requirement in Web Services. There are currently two approaches to invoking a Web Service in a non-blocking manner. The first is the client programming model where a client invokes the service in a non-blocking manner. The second way is the transport level non-blocking...
Transports In Axis2 each and every transport consists of two parts namely Transport Senders" and Transport Receivers" . We can define transports along with senders and receivers in Axis2 global configuration. The Transport Receiver is the one via which the AxisEngine receives the message whereas the transport sender is the one...
Data Binding Databinding for Axis2 is implemented in an interesting manner. Databinding has deliberately not been included in the core and hence the code generation allows different data binding frameworks to be plugged in. This is done through an extension mechanism where the codegen engine calls the extensions first and then executes the core emitter....
Custom Deployers We can deploy a service in many ways. We could deploy a service as an archive file Axis2 default by creating a service using a database or by creating a Web Service using a text file. The idea of custom deployers is to open avenues to support any kind of deployment mechanisms. Axis2 has in-built support for Archive-based...