Spring Framework provides many technologies for applications to communicate with each other over HTTP.
What are the differences among them? What criteria dictate which one to choose?
JAX-WS is a standard maintained by the JCP (Java Community Process) and every full featured application server implements it (or, at least, provides an implementation for it). It's easy to use (you just need a few annotations in your service class endpoint) and you don't need to worry about the implementation (and your application will carry less dependencies within it).
Spring-WS was widespread when JAX-WS was a work-in-progress (or didn't ever existed). It achieves the same that JAX-WS but it's a bit more cumbersome. From my experience it's loosing adepts in the benefit of the latter.
HTTP based services (as HTTP invoker and REST) claim to be a bit more lightweight than JAX-WS (because the endpoints don't need to handle the SOAP envelope) but are not as strong-typed as WSDL based ones.
When I have to choose I usually decide for JAX-WS if there is not a strong reason for the REST based approach. I don't like at all the HTTP Invoker one because it's security issues (even though when talking about intranets), but I think this is a kind of personal choice.