I was just curious if there was any consideration for the XFire web service stack instead of Axis. In my experience, it has much better support for Spring and is considerably faster.
We used it in a production application last year with great success. It's primary client was a .NET application, and we didn't have any major issues. It's fast, stable, lightweight, and easy to use. I've been very impressed with it. I believe it also has MTOM support now, unlike Axis 1.x. I'm not sure about Axis 2. Haven't really spent any time with it.
I can understand when you say that Axis is usually not a pleasure to work with. Particularly DIME attachmetnts…