I understand your worries about converting to maven. You said:
"introducing yet another technology needed to build Axis is not something I believe we need to do at this time."
This is exactly my point!!! Maven takes care of all these technologies for you!!! It will be the only technology you need once the build conversion is through. It automatically takes care of and downloads the dependencies. All you need to do is tell maven what dependencies there are in your project file like so:
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<id>log4j</id>
<version>1.2.6</version>
</dependency> <dependency>
<id>jaf:activation</id>
<version>1.0.2</version>
</dependency> <dependency>
<id>servletapi</id>
<version>2.3</version>
</dependency>
