Web Services with Axis

I'm currently thinking about using Web Services as a more robust (i.e. more tolerant to changes, compared to RMI) protocol for widely re-used services. Two days of fiddling with Axis 1.2 RC2 make me doubt whether that's a good idea. At least the jax-rpc stuff seems still quite brittle, especially on the client-side. Maybe, using WSDL2Java to generate stubs is not a good idea at all. One more attribute in a bean instantly breaks the client (the bean-deserializer complains about an illegal element). I'd rather like a more generic client - maybe a less picky bean-(de-)serializer will do ...