Session management is very useful feature when it comes to enterprise level applications. However, few years ago there was not a single notion on session management in Web services . Now the situation is different.
ServiceLifeCycle is a way to manage life cycle of a particular service you deploy in Axis2. For example, let's say you want to create a database connection at the server startup time and you need to use the connection throughout the lifetime of the services. And furthernore, assume that when the system goes down, you want to close the connection. Such situations may be a good example for the usage of service life cycle.
The Apache Axis2 client API provides you a convenient mechanism to talk to a Web service. You can simply pass the payload you need to send and Axis2 will take care of the rest. But what if you are interested in more than what is being sent in the body of the SOAP message? What if you want to add custom headers to the request?
Part 1 of this article by Eran Chinthaka educates you on the architecture of AXIOM and how to navigate through the object model, with the focus on what makes AXIOM an object model for representing XML which is low on memory foot print, yet very fast .
