As mentioned in Chapter 1, Apache Web Services and Axis2, one of the main goals of the Axis2 design is to provide more user friendliness; in the meantime, providing better extendibility and flexibility to the system. When it comes to user friendliness, service deployment is one area where the user needs less work. As a result, Axis2 supports a very convenient deployment model with a number of new features, compared to Apache Axis1. Some of the commonly used and useful sets of features are shown here:
J2EE-like deployment mechanism (archive-based)
Hot deployment and hot update
Idea of repository
Change in the way of deploying handlers (modules)
Deployment descriptors
Deployment options
The following figure shows the J2EE-like deployment mechanism:
In any J2EE application server, you can deploy an application as a self-contained package, where you can bundle all your resources, configuration files, and binary files together into one file, and deploy it.
Isn't that easy...