-----Original Message----- From: Martin Jericho [mailto:mart...@jabmail.com] Sent: Sunday, November 24, 2002 7:02 PM To: axis...@xml.apache.org Subject: Re: Document style web services

Hi Tom

I spent about a week playing around with axis to see why it wasn't working for me, and simplifying test cases to find out the causes. I did post a couple of bug reports on bugzilla, but no-one has even commented on them yet. I really did want to stick with axis, but in the end I had to make a decision which was expedient for my project, which was to generate the WSDL using .NET. I can't afford to spend the time investigating and writing bug reports for axis when there is another solution which works perfectly for me.

I didn't report any of the other bugs primarily because they were too numerous, and it takes a significant amount of time to write up a bug report that is truly useful to the developer. They were also quite fundamental, so would be easily detected by anyone else creating even the simplest of services. This also makes me think they may have already been addressed in the nightly builds.

Nightly builds bring up a whole new area of gripes. Firstly, it always turns out to be a major pain, involving a fair amount of guesswork, to upgrade to even a release version of axis. This is because our project uses jakarta projects such as torque (which btw we are now quite desperate to abandon), and velocity, and each expects different versions of the commons libraries, xerces and log4j. The problem is that none of the jakarta jar libraries contain any version information whatsoever, so it is always guesswork to figure out which one is using the latest version, and very often they are not even backwards-compatible. Axis itself is no better in this regard. The jar file is always called axis.jar, with no version suffix, and the manifest file never includes a version number either. I am not willing to use a nightly version of axis in production, and only use beta versions of tools when there is no alternative. What would be great is if there were a CVS branch created after 1.0, which included only bug fixes that are then released in "service packs". I know this means more work for you guys, but in the real world you can't expect companies to use nightly builds unless they are heavily involved in the product's development like Macromedia is.

Even writing a response like this takes up valuable development time (which I can afford at the moment because the server just kicked the bucket!). I don't apologise for not taking more time to contribute to axis, it's just a reality.