Apache axis is an implementation of the soap ("simple object access protocol") submission to w3c.

from the draft w3c specification:

soap is a lightweight protocol for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. it is an xml based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined datatypes, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses.

this project is a follow-on to the apache soap project.