What are some different frameworks which can be used for SOAP

Question

Besides the following link, which is pro Spring, are there any other resources which show pros and cons of different Frameworks that can be used to implement SOAP in java

http://blog.arendsen.net/wp-content/TheSpringExperienceSpringWebServices.pdf

Also, I read the following on [Axis Wiki]

Q: What is Apache Axis? What's its relationship to Apache SOAP?

A: As a client to a web service, encoding your requests to the web service, and decoding the responses you get back, to and from XML would be a pain (not to mention implementing the logic that deals with accepting requests and sending responses). The same goes if you're writing the web service yourself. Most folks use Apache Axis to do all that for them. You could write web service clients and servers without something like Axis, but it would be very tedious.

so Axis is only required if you are consuming a web service? is it not required when providing a web service?

Answer 1

Well, Axis can do both. You can also use

• JAX-WS reference implementation (from Metro)
• Apache CXF

Both are full-featured web-service stacks.

A separate SOAP-only component is SAAJ. You can take a look at it, if you want to manually send SOAP messages.

Answer 2

When choosing a SOAP framework you must first decide if you are going contract-first (writing the WSDL file yourself) or contract-last (the WSDL file gets generated from code). There are multiple pros and cons of each method, but the most important are:

• Often contract-last style frameworks are easy to get started with. However a change in the exposed domain model may yield a change in the contract (WSDL).
• In contract-first you have the extra overhead of writing the WSDL yourself.

As for frameworks I have found JAX-WS (Metro) to be the best for contract-last and Spring WS the best for contract-first. On a personal note I might add that I prefer contract-first, it really is worth the extra effort.