Welcome to Javaranch Andrew,
Thanks for posting at the under right forum category.
Regd your question..
Simply, the webserivces works in away that the client will send a SOAP request for which the server will send a SOAP response.
Now Axis is a tool which can help you to automate the above process. With that in mind, the client stub that you have generated using wsdl2java will call the server by sending the soap request and receives back the soap response. The client stub will also read this soap response and gives the reponsse data after deserialization. So the main purpose of this wsdl2java is: it will automatically do the job of serialization and deserialization upon such client-server interaction.
>I can't use web service, but I have an example SOAP response.
In that case, all you need is a simple DOM or SAX based xml parser to read the soap response. You dont need Axis for this.
Please also check our webservices FAQ.
http://faq.javaranch.com/view?WebServicesFaq Feel free to post back your doubts.