Alexey Zavizionov: Web Services: AXIS, XFire, CXF, JAX-WS

wiki

Monitoring SOAP messages
Axis SOAPMonitor User's Guide
Apache TCPMon (Tutorial)
java.net tcpmon)

Axis1
official and wiki
JIRA and mail
sources

Release notes and what in this realise
User Guide
Commands - Axis Reference Guide

SOAP 1.1/1.2 compliant engine
Flexible configuration / deployment system
Support for "drop-in" deployment of SOAP services (JWS)
Support for all basic types, and a type mapping system for defining new serializers/deserializers
Automatic serialization/deserialization of Java Beans, including customizable mapping of fields to XML elements/attributes
Automatic two-way conversions between Java Collections and SOAP Arrays
Providers for RPC and message based SOAP services
Automatic WSDL generation from deployed services
WSDL2Java tool for building Java proxies and skeletons from WSDL documents
Java2WSDL tool for building WSDL from Java classes.
Preliminary security extensions, which can integrate with Servlet 2.2 security/roles
Support for session-oriented services, via HTTP cookies or transport-independent SOAP headers
Preliminary support for the SOAP with Attachments specification
An EJB provider for accessing EJB's as Web Services
HTTP servlet-based transport
JMS based transport
Standalone version of the server (with HTTP support)
Examples, including a client and server for the SoapBuilders community interoperability tests and experimental TCP, JMS, and file-based transports.
This version has passed the JAX-RPC 1.1 and SAAJ 1.2 TCKs.

Axis uses it's own internal databinding system (referred to as de/serialization) that's based on SAX. It is not a pluggable option. (Perhaps you've seen messages such as "no deserialized found for [qname]). Axis provides built-in de/serializers for beans and arrays, and you can provide custom de/serializers for other types. You specify the de/serializers to use, and the mapping between qnames and types in the WSDD using the beanMapping and typeMapping options.

If you want to use a third-party databinding system, then you must use the low-level message provider (provider="MSG"), which deserializes the message into DOM, which you can then bind to your object model.

Axis2
official and wiki
JIRA and mail
sources

Release notes
Commands - Code Generator Tool Guide for Command Line and Ant Task
Reference (WSDL2Java and Java2WSDL)
Constants
Code Generator Wizard Guide for Eclipse Plug-in
Service Archive Generator Wizard Guide for Eclipse Plug-in

Programming Model:

Improved XML-centric client API with full WSDL and policy support
Support for POJO and Spring services and clients
Support for any message exchange pattern (MEP)
Synchronous and asynchronous programming model
Archived service deployment model supporting full service encapsulation with versioning support
Archived module deployment model supporting controlled extensibility with versioning support
Hot deployment
WS-Policy driven code generation extensions
Flexible service life cycle model
Automatic support for POX (REST) style invocation of services
Support for querying service's WSDL (with ?wsdl), schema (with ?xsd) and policies (with ?policy)
WSDL 2.0POJO annotation (JSR 181)
JAX-WS intregration
Custom Deployers
Binary serialization (Fast Infoset)
JSON support
EJB Provider support
Supported Specifications:
SOAP 1.1 and 1.2
Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM)
XML Optimized Packaging (XOP)
SOAP with Attachments
WSDL 1.1, including both SOAP and HTTP bindings
WS-Addressing submission and 1.0
WS-Policy
SAAJ 1.1

Transports:

HTTP, SMTP, JMS, TCP
Supported Data Bindings:
Axis Data Binding (ADB), XMLBeans, JibX, JaxMe (Experimental), JaxBRI (Experimental)

Tools:

WSDL2Java, Java2WSDL, Eclipse Plugins, Maven2 Plugins, ...

XFire
official and wiki
JIRA and mail

Support for important Web Service standards - SOAP, WSDL, WS-I Basic Profile, WS-Addressing, WS-Security, etc.
High performance SOAP Stack
Pluggable bindings POJOs, XMLBeans, JAXB 1.1, JAXB 2.0, and Castor support
JSR 181 API to configure services via Java 5 and 1.4 (Commons attributes JSR 181 syntax)
Support for many different transports - HTTP, JMS, XMPP, In-JVM, etc.
Embeddable and Intuitive API
Spring, Pico, Plexus, and Loom support.
JBI Support
Client and server stub generation
JAX-WS early access support

Howto use wsgen and wsdlgen
Client and Server Stub Generation from WSDL
Web Services on XFire – Fast Forward to 2007
Eclipse Plugin
Axis vs XFire
Stack Comparison

CXF
official and wiki
JIRA and mail

JAX-WS frontend
Java2WSDL and WSDL2Java tools and Maven plugin
SOAP 1.1 & 1.2, XML and RESTful HTTP bindings
JAXB 2.0 Databinding support
JSON support with Jettison
WSDL 1.1 support
WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-Policy support
MTOM attachment support
HTTP, Servlet, JMS and Local Transports
Simple POJO service frontend
Javascript frontend
JBI Service Engine. CXF services can be deployed into any JBI compliant container (ServiceMix or OpenESB)
JCA 1.0 support, J2EE application can integrate with legacy application through JCA 1.0 support in CXF
Spring Support