I'm thinking of this article as a foundation entry in my blog. This is a topic I will build upon in the future with more detailed entries. With that said and with all the talk surrounding Web Services many developers are being forced to come up to speed quickly to address the needs of their customers. One of the products I've found very helpful is the Open Source apache product called Axis. Axis is a software framework used to implement Java based Web Services and it has reach a point where I think I'm going to be using it whenever I can.

Many of the tools Axis provides allows developers to bypass the complicated specifications and coding tasks required in getting Web Services up and running. The best part of all this is that it is an Open Source product that requires little investment other then the ability a developer to come up to speed. With that said the documentation surrounding the project is a little light once a developer starts doing things beyond the basics. However, there are books available such as Programming Apache Axis by Chris Haddad and Apache Axis Live: A Web Services Tutorial by James Goodwill. I myself haven't read either of these and have been able to muddle through the lack of documentation but it is good to know that something is out there.

Axis comes in the form of a web application that can easily be deployed to any of the modern web application servers on the market. Once the basic framework is installed it has a utility to deploy a Web Service to the application server. Once this new Web Service is deployed it also has a utility that will create a Web Services client, which can act upon the service you have just created. In future article I will explain the ways Axis can be used and even some step-by-step examples.