I suggest taking a look at Quartz (http://www.part.net/quartz.html). It is
another open source  scheduler and is not tied into Turbine.

As for SOAP you can either go with Axis as you have suggested or you can try
GLUE from The Mind Electric (http://www.themindelectric.com) which reportedly
has a very good SOAP implementation. GLUE is free  for most uses. You can take
a look at the license at http://www.themindelectric.com/glue/license-STD.html .