Difference between Apache CXF and Axis

Question

What are the advantages of using Apache CXF over Apache Axis and vice versa

User · Answer

As per my experience CXF is good in terms of configuring it into Spring environment  Also the generated classes are simple to understand  And as it is more active  we get better support in comparison to AXIS or AXIS2

User · Answer

Keep in mind  I m completely biased  PMC Chair of CXF   but my thoughts   From a strictly  can the project do what I need it to do  perspective  both are pretty equivalent   There some  edge case  things that CXF can do that Axis 2 cannot and vice versa   But for 90  of the use cases  either will work fine   Thus  it comes down to a bunch of other things other than  check box features       API - CXF pushes  standards based  API s  JAX-WS compliant  whereas Axis2 general goes toward proprietary things    That said  even CXF may require uses of proprietary API s to configure control various things outside the JAX-WS spec     For REST  CXF also uses standard API s  JAX-RS compliant  instead of proprietary things     Yes  I m aware of the JAX-WS runtime in Axis2  but the tooling and docs and everything doesn t target it  Community aspects and supportability - CXF prides itself on responding to issues and making  fixpacks  available to users    CXF did 12 fixpacks for 2 0 x  released two years ago  so about every 2 months   6 fixpacks to 2 1 x  and now 3 for 2 2 x    Axis2 doesn t really  support  older versions   Unless a  critical  issue is hit  you may need to wait till the next big release  they average about every 9-10 months or so  to get fixes    although  with either  you can grab the source code and patch fix yourself   Gotta love open source   Integration - CXF has much better Spring integration if you use Spring    All the configuration and such is done through Spring    Also  people tend to consider CXF as more  embeddable   I ve never looked at Axis2 from this perspective  into other applications   Not sure if things like that matter to you  Performance - they both perform very well    I think Axis2 s proprietary ADB databinding is a bit faster than CXF  but if you use JAXB  standards based API s again   CXF is a bit faster    When using more complex scenarios like WS-Security  the underlying security  engine   WSS4J  is the same for both so the performance is completely comparable    Not sure if that answers the question at all   Hope it at least provides some information     -   Dan

User · Answer

Another advantage of CXF  it connects to web servers using NTLMV2 authentication out of the box   used by Windows 2008  amp  up   Before using CXF  I hacked Axis2 to use HTTPClient V4   JCIFS to make this possible

User · Answer

Axis2  More ubiquitous on the marketplace  supports more bindings  supports other languages like C C    CXF  Much easier to use  more Spring friendly  faster got support for some WS-  extensions

User · Answer

One more thing is the activity of the community  Compare the mailing list traffic for axis and cxf  2013     Axis user 50-100 mails per month CXF user 400-500 mails per month   So if this is any indicator of usage then axis is by far less used than cxf   Compare CXF and Axis statistics at ohloh  CXF has very high activity while Axis has low activity overall   This is the chart for the number of commits over time for CXF  red  and Axis1  green  Axis2  blue

User · Answer

The advantages of CXF    CXF supports for WS-Addressing  WS-Policy  WS-RM  WS-Security and WS-I BasicProfile  CXF implements JAX-WS API  according by JAX-WS 2 0 TCK   CXF has better integration with Spring and other frameworks  CXF has high extensibility in terms of their interceptor strategy  CXF has more configurable feature via the API instead of cumbersome XML files  CXF has Bindings SOAP REST HTTP  and its Data Bindings support JAXB 2 0 Aegis  by default it use JAXB 2 0 and more close Java standard specification  CXF has abundant toolkits  e g  Java to WSDL  WSDL to Java  XSD to WSDL  WSDL to XML  WSDL to SOAP  WSDL to Service    The advantages of Axis2    Axis2 also supports WS-RM  WS-Security  and WS-I BasicProfile except for WS-Policy  I expect it will be supported in an upcoming version  Axis has more options for data bindings for your choose Axis2 supports multiple languages   including C C   version and Java version  Axis2 supports a wider range of data bindings  including XMLBeans  JiBX  JaxMe and JaxBRI as well  as its own native data binding  ADB  longer history than CXF    In Summary  From above advantage items  it brings us to a good thoughts to compare Axis2 and CXF on their own merits  they all have different well-developed areas in a certain field  CXF is very configurable  integratable and has rich tool kits supported and close to Java community  Axis2 has taken an approach that makes it in many ways resemble an application server in miniature  it is across multiple programming languages  because its Independence  Axis2 lends itself towards web services that stand alone  independent of other applications  and offers a wide variety of functionality   As a developer  we need to accord our perspective to choose the right one  whichever framework you choose  you   ll have the benefit of an active and stable open source community  In terms of performance  I did a test based the same functionality and configed in the same web container  the result shows that CXF performed little bit better than Axis2  the single case may not exactly reflect their capabilities and performance   In some research articles  it reveals that Axis2 s proprietary ADB databinding is a bit faster than CXF since it don   t have additional feature WS-Security   Apache AXIS2 is relatively most used framework but Apache CXF scores over other Web Services Framework comparatively considering ease of development  current industry trend  performance  overall scorecard and other features  unless there is Web Services Orchestration support is explicitly needed  which is not required here

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