Hmm... this is kind of a loaded question... Since you're asking on the cxf-user list, you'll obviously get responses that are slanted more toward CXF.. :-)

Couple comments though....

I don't think this is true. Axis 2 doesn't support JAX-RPC and it's JAX-WS support is not finished yet. (probably a month off or so, at least) For people that require JAX-RPC, they'll probably need to stay on Axis 1. I don't know if the Axis 2 folks plan to certify JAX-WS standalone or not. The Geronimo folks are planning to to certify with Axis 2 for JAX-WS/J2EE, but they have ALREADY certified with CXF for JAX-WS/J2EE. CXF 2.0 is JAX-WS compliant today.

In any case, for most basic use cases, either Axis 2 or CXF should be able to fit the bill. The differences are mostly in approach. Axis 2 tends to do things in a more "proprietary" way (proprietary APIs, packaging, datamodels, deployment models, etc...) and then tries to bolt on the standands more as an afterthought. The JAX-WS case is a good example. CXF, on the other hand, promotes the standards based APIs as the default. JAX-WS and JAXB are our preferred API's. There are proprieatry API's that you may need to use for advanced things (and also migration from XFire, etc...) but for most cases, stick with the standards. We also tried to leverage other existing and popular technology such as Spring a bit better.

The other point of note is that the CXF folks have worked closely with the Apache Yoko folks to produce a CORBA binding for CXF. With Apache CXF + Apache Yoko, you can actually use the standards based JAX-WS+JAXB API's to communicate with CORBA services (and expose your JAX-WS+JAXB services to CORBA clients). The CXF framework was designed to support pluggable bindings like that. (Axis 2 may as well, I don't really know)

From a pure "bullet list" of features, I don't think either one would really win out. CXF supports some stuff Axis 2 doesn't and vice versa. As Paul Brown said in his reply, you really need to evaluate everything and see what "feels" best for your use case. I think the two major things that set CXF apart would be it's support for standards (both the WS-* standards as well as the Java programming model standards) and it's flexibility in deployment models (in servlet engine, embeddable, standalone, Spring, etc....).

Did that clarify anything or make it worse?

Dan

On Thursday 05 July 2007 12:08, Arkady Kasianski wrote: