The concept of service extension is a new feature to the Apache Axis paradigm, but the developers have achieved the same goal doing a hard job in Axis 1.x. So the idea is to extend the core functionality of the system or to provide quality of services. In the case of Axis 1.x, if you need to extend its core functionality, you need to write a handler (the smallest unit in the execution chain), change the global configuration files to add the handler, and finally restart the system.
A module does the same bit of work, but reduces the amount of work you need to do. In the meantime, a module can have one or more handlers alone with a module descriptor called module.xml
. Most of the time, a module is an implementation of a specific WS specification. For example, an Axis2 addressing module is an implementation of WS addressing; Sandesha is an implementation of WS-Reliable Messaging.
As mentioned earlier, you can deploy a module as an archive file...