Now it's okay to give up.

I'd have guessed that the reason is that there really aren't
very many people using that stuff-- I suppose I mean "people
who need the full-on Web Services architecture, rather than
just a servlet runner -- but a quick search proves me wrong;
the axis-users mailing list consistently gets more than 1000
posts a month.

I've written very little in the last three years besides
web applications in Java, and somehow I've completely
missed all this stuff. I've seen a web service, once, but
the company that had hired us to publish a service for
them never got their basic platform to work at all. (Come
to think of it, there was probably a valuable lesson there.)

Wallowing in my own ignorance is cool and everything, but
I actually have an application right now that spends a great
deal of time (and code) exchanging XML messages between a
client and server--even using HTTP(S) to do it. (Lots of the
clients are behind firewalls they have little control over,
and that was a simple way to cope.)

Is it likely that I've re-invented something like SOAP here?
If so, are there frameworks out there that I could adopt that
would replace a lot of my code with something better--presumably
more robust, and maybe with some nifty convenience tools?

I'd be happy to fill in details about my current application
if it would make a useful example for someone with more clue to
fill us in on how to start getting a handle (and maybe some
benefit) from all this work.