Relationship with com.sun.xml.ws?

[oliviercailloux]

Multiple jaxws-maven-plugin artifacts can be found on Maven Central, three of which have been updated recently. Here are the group ids and the developers as mentioned in the respective poms.

• org.codehaus.mojo (this project), by Lukas Jungmann (Oracle), Rama Pulavarthi (@​Sun), Kohsuke Kawaguchi (@​Sun), Guillaume Nodet (@​Apache, LogicBlaze, Inc), Dan Tran
• com.sun.xml.ws (source possibly here), by Lukas Jungmann (Oracle), Roman Grigoriadi (@​Oracle), Zheng Jun Li (@​Oracle)
• com.helger.maven (source), by Lukas Jungmann (Oracle), Rama Pulavarthi (@​Sun), Kohsuke Kawaguchi (@​Sun), Guillaume Nodet (@​Apache, LogicBlaze, Inc), Dan Tran

The two older ones have these group ids.

• org.jvnet.jax-ws-commons
• net.trajano.mojo

The website indicates that this project used the org.jvnet.jax-ws-commons group id previously, but does not mention the other three.

It would be useful to relate this project especially to the two other ones which seem to be developing in parallel and using totally different version schemes. com.sun.xml.ws published version 2.3.3-b01 last December, whereas this project already had a version 2.5 published since 2017, and published a 2.6 version in 2020. com.helger.maven published version 2.6 in 2018, and published version 2.6.2 in 2019. It seems currently difficult to know, for example, if all these versions have the same issues, or if it is worth trying another one when one suspects a bug; or know if one of these plugins is more “official”.

It seems that the com.helger.maven one started as a fork of the org.codehaus.mojo at a time where the latter was unmaintained, published a com.helger.maven:jaxws-maven-plugin:2.6 version in 2018 (continuing with the numbering scheme of org.codehaus.mojo:jaxws-maven-plugin), then 2.6.1 and 2.6.2; and meanwhile, org.codehaus.mojo came back to life and published its own 2.6 version in 2020. But I ignore whether, for example, the patches in the com.helger.maven fork in the 2.6.x versions have been integrated back into the org.codehaus.mojo:jaxws-maven-plugin:2.6 version…

Some words of clarification would help many developers, I suspect!

[oliviercailloux]

Just found this: essentially the same question, with the poster mentioning that Lukas Jungmann told them that the eclipse-ee4j/metro-jax-ws plugin is “the way to go”.