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.

But Axis isn't just a SOAP engine -- it also includes:

• a simple stand-alone server,



• a server which plugs into servlet engines such as Tomcat,



• extensive support for the Web Service Description Language (WSDL),



• emitter tooling that generates Java classes from WSDL.



• some sample programs, and



• a tool for monitoring TCP/IP packets.

Axis is the third generation of Apache SOAP (which began at IBM as "SOAP4J").

Axis now delivers the following 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 - http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl, 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.