Apache Axis™ is a second generation SOAP engine, the successor to the Apache SOAP project, itself based on the original SOAP4J code that IBM contributed to Apache in April 2000. In contrast to its predecessor, Axis is fully WSDL aware. It also supports the JAX-RPC API.

Today, Apache Axis is to a large extend superseded by a new generation of SOAP stacks such as Apache Axis2, Apache CXF and Metro. However, Axis is still relevant for the following type of projects:

• Projects that need to use JAX-RPC. There are only two Open Source implementations of that API: Axis and Sun's reference implementation.
• Projects that need to consume or expose Web services that use SOAP encoding. SOAP encoding has been deprecated and is no longer supported by modern Web service frameworks. However, there are still legacy services that use type of encoding.
• Existing projects that were built using Axis and for which the return on investment of rewriting them using a modern Web service framework would be too low.

Apache Axis, Axis, Apache, the Apache feather logo, and the Apache Axis project logo are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation.