Apache Axis Retirement

Salesforce deprecated Apache Axis on October 2021. If your organization currently uses this framework, we wanted to tell you how this impacts you and what your options are.

You’re also probably wondering why we’re retiring Apache Axis. Salesforce wants to focus development on Trust and security enhancements, which led us to retire this framework.  We ask that all customers leverage the Apache CXF web services framework currently available in the Commerce Cloud platform.

How did this change impact my org? 

Apache Axis web service framework is referred to as webreference within Commerce Cloud support ended on October 2021.

The replacement is WebReference2 (CXF v3). This is much more widely used than Axis and has frequent releases and patches. CXF does not retain support for ‘rpc/encoded’ type of messages and thus RPC support will be removed with this migration as well. If you’re using rpc/encoded messages with AXIS, there may be a need for additional efforts to convert them to either the rpc/literal or document type messages in addition to migrating to CXF.

What action did I need to take? 

You will need to move your WSDL files from webreferences to webreferences2 and update any script code to use the new classes. All calls to APIs in `dw.rpc` must be removed since they are specific to webreferences. The `dw.ws` package contains similar utilities specific to webreferences2, but it is not a drop-in replacement.

This change will also result in the deprecation of support for RPC as RPC is no longer supported in Apache CXF.  CXF is already leveraged by most of our customers making web service calls.

What happens if I don’t take action?

If you don’t migrate to WebReference2 (CXFv3) by October 2021, web service calls leveraging AXIS (webreference) will fail to compile and run, impacting third-party integrations and potential product service availability.

How can you identify web service calls that were impacted? 

Customers can identify any impacts through Business Manager under Site Development by navigating to Development Setup > WebDav Access > Cartridges.  Any cartridge with a “webreferences” directory within the active version containing WSDL files would be impacted.  

Please note: “webreferences2” is not impacted, and customers are asked to migrate to “webreferences2” (CXF).

If you have more questions, open a case with Support via Salesforce Help. To view all current and past feature retirements, see Salesforce Feature Retirement.

To read about the Salesforce approach to retiring products and features, read our Feature Retirement Philosophy.