After updating apacheSOAP to the latest version - it seems it detects nil corectly, and it has another problem.
What apacheSOAP sends is: <name xsi:type="xsd:string" xsi:null="true"/> What Axis sends: <name xsi:nil="true"/> ApacheSOAP doesn't accept this input, since the type is missing ( xsd:string ) - so it fails with: No mapping found for ':name' using encoding style 'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/'.; targetException=java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: No mapping found for ':name' using encoding style 'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/'.] at org.apache.soap.rpc.Call.invoke(Call.java:296) I have no idea who is right and who is wrong, but it's very scarry. Costin