"I like the fact that XFire supports making pluggable bindings," said Duc Trinh, systems architect at Wells Fargo. Users can replace bindings online, he said.

Although XFire will add WS-Security, Diephouse has issues with the specification. "It just doesn't scale," Trinh said.

XFire handles large object tree collections well, according to Diephouse. It doesn't support RPC encoding but uses document literal Web services, he said.

Apache, meanwhile, announced Axis2 0.95. New in this version are transport framework improvements.

Other features in Axis2 include Axiom, which is an XML object model, according to Apache. XML Infoset support is featured also.