Difference between Apache CXF and Axis

Question

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

• 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.

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).

The advantages of CXF:

1. CXF supports for WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-RM, WS-Security and WS-I BasicProfile.
2. CXF implements JAX-WS API (according by JAX-WS 2.0 TCK).
3. CXF has better integration with Spring and other frameworks.
4. CXF has high extensibility in terms of their interceptor strategy.
5. CXF has more configurable feature via the API instead of cumbersome XML files.
6. 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.
7. 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:

1. 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.
2. Axis has more options for data bindings for your choose
3. Axis2 supports multiple languages—including C/C++ version and Java version.
4. 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)

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.