Axis2 – 1.0 First impressions

I’ve had some opportunity to play around with the newly released Axis2, apaches web service framework and container. Essentially this is a complete rewrite of Axis 1.x which is why it is called Axis2 - 1.0.

This brings me to the first point of criticism: This is needlessly confusing. It is really a completely separate product and the two products sharing, for example, a mailinglist makes no sense at all (just annoys users of either browsing through the messages). It should have a different name and its own mailinglist. Then the 1.0 status. Traditionally 1.0 is associated with a certain level of quality and feature completeness. With axis2 - 1.0 this is undeniably not a 1.0 by any standards. A few points of criticism:

Does this mean it is a bad product? Yes and no. If you regard this as a middleware component to be integrated by e.g. geronimo, it’s current state is probably acceptable since the integrator can fix things; provide documentation and provide proper tooling. If on the other hand you expect the thousands of axis 1.x users to migrate to axis 2 at this point then no way. I’m sure things will get better from here on but there is a lot of work to do before I would recommend anyone to migrate. Production usage of axis2 at this point will be causing a lot of people a lot of headaches at this point. At this point I am willing to deal with the issues above and will continue using it (mainly because I’m interested in using some of its features). However, this is in my book an alpha release, not even a beta. I’m used to more quality from apache and am honestly wondering what the hell happened there.