The minimum required Java version for Axis2 has been changed to Java 8.
The Apache Commons HttpClient 3.x based HTTP transport has been removed.
The HTTPClient 4.x based transport has been upgraded to use the APIs supported by the latest HTTPClient version.
Because of the HTTPClient 4.x changes and also JAX-WS changes in the 1.7.x series, users are strongly encouraged to update their axis2.xml.
JSON support now includes Moshi as an alternative to GSON. The JSON documentation now includes a JSON and Spring Boot userguide with a WAR application demonstrating Spring Security with tokens. Many bug fixes in general. Any future growth of Axis2 depends on how well the community responds to the increasing focus on JSON.
Source control is now via Git and GitHub: https://github.com/apache/axis-axis2-java-core
Logging is now via Apache Log4j 2 instead of 1.x. A large focus this release has been on modernizing dependencies. Github Dependabot is handling this now automatically.
As explained in the Spring userguide, Spring inside the AAR is no longer supported. The rest of the Spring support is unchanged.
To improve dependency management, the data binding JARs have been split to separate the code required at build time from the code required at runtime:
axis2-jibx has been split into axis2-jibx and axis2-jibx-codegen.axis2-xmlbeans has been split into axis2-xmlbeans and axis2-xmlbeans-codegen.axis2-jaxbri has been renamed to axis2-jaxbri (The JAXB-RI data binding doesn't require any additional classes at runtime).