I have been looking into the various potential solutions for accessing a SOAP service in Java. So far I have not been able to discern whether Sun's Java Web Services Developer Pack v.1.2 is preferable to Axis.
Apparently version 1.2 of JWSDP was released on June 7, 2003. I have discerned from various newsgroup postings that Axis is somewhat better than the older versions of JWSDP. What is not obvious is how the newest 1.2 release of JWSDP stacks up to Axis. To further confuse the issue, it is apparent that the JAX-RPC implementation shipped by Sun (in JWSDP) is intended not only as a reference implementation but also for production use. It may be worth mentioning that I am currently coding in Eclipse but performing external builds with Ant. I am also currently making use of the catalina release of tomcat although I may use a different container for production. Generally speaking I prefer to use a truly open-source solution, but as a practical matter from a user's standpoint the differences between the Sun open-source license and a true open source license is somewhat academic. The real business need is generally to find something economical (i.e. free) that isn't going to disappear anytime soon and is mature. I simply want to choose the technically best open-source or almost open-source solution that appears most likely to be the preferred solution by most other developers in the future. (If I was leading an open source project I would insist on a GPL or BSD style license but that's a whole different conversation.) Any information that helps me to decide which solution to choose will be appreciated.
