Sunday 19 August, 2007

Open source software for web services frameworks

For one of our customers, I recently investigated availability of open source software for web services frameworks. I was amazed to see that not only there are many options but also there is a good amount of competition among them to prove to be the best option. Obviously, I am evaluating them on the basis of our customer requirements. I have short-listed following five options, which you may also consider if you need to evaluate and select an open source software for web services framework.

1. Apache Axis2: Currently available in its version 1.3, Apache Axis2 is complete rewrite of Apache Axis.

2. Apache CXF: A merger of XFire and IONA-backed Ciltrix, CXF has released its version 2.0 recently. This project is currently in incubation at Apache.

3. JBossWS: It is part of JBoss Application Server.

4. Metro: As part of GlassFish project, Metro is actually a reference implementation for JAX-WS. It was earlier known as JWSDP.

5. Spring Web Services: Developed by Spring community, Spring-WS is made for developing web services by using contract-first principle. As I am fan of this development principle, exploration of this software is very much on my agenda now. It has just released its version 1.0.

A good comparison among first four options and few more is available at http://wiki.apache.org/ws/StackComparison.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is great info to know.