Web services are gaining a lot of popularity in the industry and have become one of the major enabler for application integration. In addition, due to the flexibility and advantages of using web services, everyone is trying to enable web service support for their applications. As a result, web service frameworks need to support new and more custom requirements. As we have already discussed in the previous chapters, one of the major goals of a web service framework is to deliver incoming messages into the target service. However, just delivering the message to the service is not enough; today's applications are required to have reliability, security, transaction, and other quality services.
Due to the popularity of web services, standard bodies are producing new web service standards, and it is hard to support those new standards if the web service framework is not flexible enough. From the very beginnings of Axis2, flexibility and extensibility were the...