Axis is based on the older JAX-RPC standard. If you want to use another form of data binding that doesn't derive from JAX-RPC data mapping, you are basically reduced to using the
Message service style and cobbling things together yourself without support from the WSDL2Java/Java2WSDL tools.
See Also:
Anne Thomas Manes: Why you might want to use Axis Message Style Axis2 is based on the newer JAX-WS standards. So it can somewhat support
JSR 181: Web Services Metadata for the Java Platform (
web service magic pixie dust) and
JSR 224: Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.0 Annotations. The data-binding options are currently limited to ADB (Axis2 Data Binding), XmlBeans and JiBX.
Why ADB by default (Expanded Mode) chooses to create a class for each complexType
and top level elements I have yet to comprehend - WSDL2Java under Axis2 will lead to a class explosion of twice as many classes as it would under Axis! Somehow
All top level elements become classes. This is a rather questioning feature since unless classes are generated for the top level elements the handling of elements become difficult and messy!
just doesn't explain it. It seems that the element bean classes use their own QName while the complexType bean classes use the specified QName - however that means that often an element from an XML document is represented by an element bean which for the most part simply delegates to the complexType bean that it contains. Maybe the Helper Mode will eventually sort this out.
However Sun's de-facto Java EE 5 XML data-binding framework
JSR 222: JavaTM Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) 2.0 isn't supported by the Axis2 toolset (yet).
For that kind of support you will have to look at
Glassfish (
Metro) or one of the other Super-Platforms (JAXB is also part of the Java 6 SE).