James Strachan points to Spring WS, another effort to create an open source Web services framework. To quote him:

Worse it doesn’t seem to play nice with any other SOAP stack and completely ignores JSR 181 and JAX-WS which are where its at these days for SOAP stacks.

Needless to say, I couldn’t disagree more — I consider JAX-WS to be an abomination. In fact, I think that Spring WS’s design goals, as outlined in this presentation, are very much in line with Alpine’s goals (as outlined in the original paper by Steve and Ed and paraphrased by yours truly here).

I’m also pretty convinced that the NIH principle is a non-issue in open source software.