Many of the open source projects are going the Axis path. JBossWS went that way until the 4.0 version(that got certified for J2EE 1.4 compliance). To achieve compliance, JBossWS had to fork Axis 1.1 and make it compliant with Enterprise Web Services. The Axis project has moved onto Axis 1.2 version. I do not think they will need our forked code back!

Resources:

• JBossWS Wiki: http://www.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JBossWS
• JBoss JIRA: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBWS
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  Current Situation:

Currently, development is happening to implement our own stack for Web Services. Starting JBAS 5.0, JbossWS will not use Axis but its own stack, to do web services. At the same time (or later), JBAS 4.0 will get the backported JBossWS new stack.

At JBossWorld in March, Thomas Diesler, JBossWS Project Lead, will showcase JBossWS using its own stack.

In a related area, I am working towards integrating Apache jUDDI/Apache Scout to replace the open source ebxmlrr project that is being shipped with 4.0 for JAXR (Java API for XML Registries) compliance. I am also working towards providing Web Services Tools similar to wscompile provided in JWSDP.

For the 5.0 release, we should have a solid JBossWS implementation with tools, documentation and Jaxr support (with an integrated UDDI registry). After that there will be a backport into 4.0.

On our roadmap, we do plan to implement JSR 181: Web Services Metadata for the Java Platform ( http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=181) that will provide annotational support to implement web services.

Stay tuned and give us feedback. If you have the interest to weather state of the art programming and want to contribute, look at the JIRA for tasks and start helping out.