Six Usability Improvements to the Axis2 Deployment Model

Deepal Javasinghe, one of the developers of Apache Axis2 and Synapse,  describes six improvements to the Axis2 deployment model designed to make development and testing more user friendly. The improvements described are:

• Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE)-like deployment mechanism (archive based)
• Hot deployment and hot update
• A repository (where you drop services and modules)
• Change in the deploying of handlers (modules)
• New deployment descriptors
• Multiple deployment options

The overarching result of these improvements is a mini-application server for web-services that supports all of the nicities that J2EE developers are used to (e.g. defined package structures, hot deploy, metadata configuration). The author writes:

Apache Axis2 (one of the key open source Web services platforms) benefits from a number of new features, and judiciously, most of these have resulted in giving developers a more user-friendly approach. In previous versions of Axis, user friendliness had not been a priority. For example, in Axis1, users had to invoke the admin client manually and update the server class path, and then restart the server to apply the changes. This burdensome deployment model was a definite barrier for beginners. Thus, Axis2 was engineered to overcome this drawback and provide a more flexible, easily configurable deployment model.

Axis2 1.1 was released in November (see InfoQ coverage and interview about what's new) and 1.1.1 just released this past November. Discuss