A communiqué from Misha Davidson (SilverStream Inc.) describes the release of 'jBroker Web' as a public beta version of a new SOAP ORB product. jBroker Web is "a complete XML RPC environment for platform-independent building, running, and invoking Web services using Java. It supports writing Web service interfaces using WSDL as well as Java. jBroker Web provides a complete set of compilers for converting WSDL to Java and vice versa, as well as for generating client and server XML RPC glue (stubs and skeletons) code. It comes with a high-performance, scalable SOAP 1.1 runtime that uses HTTP transport and is on-the-wire compatible with Apache SOAP and .NET. JBroker Web-generated skeletons are Java servlets. They can be deployed in any J2EE Web Application container using standard J2EE Web Application deployment. They can also benefit from the standard J2EE security features like authentication, access control, and confidentiality using SSL."

From the web site: Java RMI Programming Model. jBroker Web brings Java RMI's ease of use to the world of Web services. Invoking a Web service is the same as invoking a Remote object, and implementing a Web Service is the same as implementing a Remote interface. The technology completely shields the programmer from the fact that it is talking to a Web service (possibly described using WSDL) and that the XML messages are being exchanged under the covers. (1) If starting with Java RMI, the rmi2soap compiler generates SOAP stubs and skeletons, and the rmi2wsdl compiler generates WSDL; (2) If starting from WSDL, the wsdl2java compiler generates the Java RMI interface and SOAP stubs and skeletons; (3) The stubs are looked up by the client using standard Java JNDI APIs; (4) The Java <-> XML type mapping allows users to do custom serialization, as well as exchanging raw XML documents if required by the application... jBroker Web has a very low footprint and high performance runtime with a very flexible architecture. Initial tests have shown Web services written using jBroker Web and deployed on a commercial J2EE application server to be able to handle over 500 requests per second..."