I'm not chuffed. I've been working on a WS client (among other things) for the testers during some downtime, and run into a little problem: Axis 2 won't play ball with Java 6.

I'm caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place here: Axis 2 is a moderately buggy new product with a bunch of developers who don't bother checking their bug reports quite often (or suggested fixes) but that does make life very easy for those who want to handle their XML manually. As for Sun, Sun are the tits who decided that Java 6 should have the kitchen sink fitted as well. So I'm tending towards Sun for blame, for indulging that sloppy level of though that thinks optional libraries are a bad thing. So, I'm left with buggering around with endorsed libraries (for a client app?), forcing Java 5 or changing the stack (which gets more and more tempting).

This is a nasty trend. BEA do it with bloody WebLogic (the 'bloody' is usually found in conjunction with WLS). Given the tendency of XML tools to self-register and BEA to break things that can make life extremely unpleasant (BEA's StAX API is somewhat rubbish with string conversions, for instance, but replacing it is somewhat messy). And now Sun are well on board this bandwagon with Java 6, including a database, JAX-WS (which is an enterprise tool) and another XML API, StAX. Do these really need to be in the core? I think not.

One can only hope that, with the open sourcing of the JDK, this will not be the start of a slippery slope, with the move to a one-size-fits-all solution instead of a lean core and easy to use optional extensions. As frankly, some of us have work to do and the last thing I need is more classpath pain just to make the marketing people at Sun a bit happier.