I'd like to elaborate on Anil's blog post about JBoss' new Web Services stack and why we went this route instead of Apache AXIS.

More than a year ago, JBoss licensed the J2EE TCK from Sun to get JBoss ceritified. Web Services is an integral part of the J2EE 1.4 specification. At about this same time, the AXIS project was in flux because IBM had forked AXIS for their own proprietary products and left AXIS development entirely. We needed a compliant web services implementation immediately and AXIS 1.1 and 1.2 just wasn't even close to compliance, so we decided to fork AXIS 1.1 (the 1.2 branch was really unstable at the time). After we had passed certification, we did not officially give the code back to the AXIS project, but it remained ASL licensed so its there for the taking if Apache is interested. Since then, we decided to ramp up our own webservices team and create our own stack. This effort is well underway.

Personally, I'm glad this happened. I feel that the LGPL license and JBoss brand will do a much better job at holding our web services community together. As Anil said, Thomas Diesler will be giving a presentation at JBossWorld on our new Web Services stack.

Happy Hunting