This runtime environments is for users who prefer to develop for the open Apache Axis platform.
Axis is the third generation of the Apache SOAP implementation. It evolved from Apache SOAP to make the SOAP engine more flexible, configurable, and able to handle both SOAP and the upcoming XML Protocol specification from the W3C open-source effort. Axis is based on JSR 101 Java™ APIs for XML based RPC (also known as JAX-RPC). JSR 101 provides a single interface to any XML-based RPC mechanism, including SOAP.
Web services application server uses Axis within a servlet to process the incoming message, extract information from the message headers, and payloads, as well as conforming to the particular RPC semantics.