XFire, the SOAP engine, is now known as Apache CXF.
One advantage of CXF/XFire over Apache Axis is that the client supports NTLM using ambient credentials on Windows. This is because CXF uses the native JDK NTLM support, whereas Axis uses a pure Java reverse-engineered implementation of NTLM 1.0 (with no 2.0+ support on the horizon).