I was initially impressed with the ease of converting some classes into SOAP requests with axis, but after a while we got random service outages & bad error handling.
From previous experience in the biological field I saw great plans, lovely (& expensive) plans to develop grand services in SOAP ... that never actually materialized ... & were converted to REST spitting out standard files.
I think the ideas of SOAP, WSDL & Co are actually very interesting but as a WS consumer I've come to shun SOAP services.
In my opinion, human discoverability & excellent documentation are core to any webservice. Maybe throw in some example implementations or lightweight libraries specific to your service.
So far, our internal clients have been the only client for the axis-driven web service, so I haven't really opened it up. In other words, we're really just using axis2 for internal rpc-style calls. We also aren't transmitting much in a soap message - really just the parameters to run. The bulk of data transfer is handled through other methods.
From previous experience in the biological field I saw great plans, lovely (& expensive) plans to develop grand services in SOAP ... that never actually materialized ... & were converted to REST spitting out standard files.
I think the ideas of SOAP, WSDL & Co are actually very interesting but as a WS consumer I've come to shun SOAP services.
In my opinion, human discoverability & excellent documentation are core to any webservice. Maybe throw in some example implementations or lightweight libraries specific to your service.