The Apache Web Services Invocation Framework team announced the first open release of their Apache WSIF API.

WSIF is a WSDL-based API for invoked WSDL-described web services. It allows developers to interact with web services at an abstract level independently of the underlying protocol APIs.

The release team write:

With WSIF, developers work with the same programming model regardless of how the Web service is implemented and accessed. WSIF achieves this with a pluggable architecture with protocol-specific "providers" to handle invocations according to a specific protocol.

Supported protocols include SOAP, local Java classes, EJBs, JMS services.

The release version number is 2.0, as the 1.x numbered releases were made before the API was contributed to the Apache foundation.

More information is available at the WSIF web site.