Java web services

[Rogan Dawes]

Hi folks,

I am trying to write a tool that allows interactive querying of
arbitrary Web Services.

I have a reasonable starting point, using Sverre Huseby's SOAPDebugger,
but it does not support complex types (or arrays).

http://shh.thathost.com/pub-java/#SOAPDebugger

It is my understanding that in order to support complex types, one has
to have a corresponding java class (possibly created via WSDL2Java) that
maps to the requisite type.

Does anyone know of a way of doing this without creating Java classes?

superficially, it should not be so complex, if it all boils down to base
types in the end (int, string, date, etc)

Things I have been tossing around:

* Use WSDL2Java to create classes based on the supplied WSDL, require
that the JDK be in the classpath, and compile the necessary classes on
the fly.

* Use JROM (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/jrom) which seems like a
possibility, but appears to be unmaintained code (also licensing might
be an issue)

* Try to do this at a lower level somehow, messing directly with the XML
myself. Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with raw XML processing, so
this could be tricky! :-(

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could achieve my objective?

Many thanks!

Rogan

 

[Chris Head]

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Rogan Dawes wrote:
[snip]

* Use WSDL2Java to create classes based on the supplied WSDL, require
that the JDK be in the classpath, and compile the necessary classes on
the fly.

[snip]

Greetings,
Similar to this possibility, but much more efficient, would be a
bytecode generator. Instead of generating source code and compiling it,
figure out what classes you need and build the bytecode by hand (see
Jakarta BCEL - Byte Code Engineering Library -
http://jakarta.apache.org/bcel/ for one example; there are others).
Presumably you would have to parse the WSDL somehow in your program (I
personally don't even know what that is...) as I'm assuming WSDL2Java
produces source, which is not what you're looking for anymore.

Chris
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[Rogan Dawes]

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Hash: SHA1

Rogan Dawes wrote:
[snip]

* Use WSDL2Java to create classes based on the supplied WSDL, require
that the JDK be in the classpath, and compile the necessary classes on
the fly.

[snip]

Greetings,
Similar to this possibility, but much more efficient, would be a
bytecode generator. Instead of generating source code and compiling it,
figure out what classes you need and build the bytecode by hand (see
Jakarta BCEL - Byte Code Engineering Library -
http://jakarta.apache.org/bcel/ for one example; there are others).
Presumably you would have to parse the WSDL somehow in your program (I
personally don't even know what that is...) as I'm assuming WSDL2Java
produces source, which is not what you're looking for anymore.

Chris

Thanks for the suggestion. At this point, I'm not gunning for
efficiency, but minimum effort from my side ;-)

WSDL is an abbreviation for Web Services Definition Language (I think),
which describes the available functions, and their parameters. It is a
fairly complex XML schema, which I'd like to avoid parsing myself, if at
all possible.

However, it seems that to do what I want to, I might have to do that
parsing myself :-( Ah well!

Thanks for the comments.

Rogan