Howdy!
I'm totally new to web services, so I want to apologize prophylactically if these are dumb questions: :roll:
Okay, I want to
exchange SOAP messages with a third party system, that is I want to deploy a SOAP message
receiver (i.e. a Web Service) and a SOAP message
sender to my application server. Furthermore, I'd like both of them to use simple beans, i.e. POJOs.
Receiver:
As far as I understand it, I'd take the bean, pass it to some magical tool that generates a WSDL file (which I would then make available to the third party system), pass that file to another magical tool that generates the service code - and then? If that code receives a SOAP message and translates it into a bean - how can I jump in and get that bean?
Sender:
Taking the third party's WSDL file and giving it to that magical tool results in some code, which I could invoke with a bean as an argument which in turn would be send as a SOAP message to the third party system.
Now, if that's how it could be done (and I'd prefer to generate code rather than mess around with
Call objects and setting return types and bean (de-)serializers and so on...), what exactly are those magical tools to be used? I've read about
Apache Axis, Axis2, JAX-WS, JAX-RPC, etc... it's hell of a jungle and I really don't know if they all accomplish the same. But it would be nice if there was a tool that could be integrated into the
Maven2 build process.
And above all: would it matter to the third party system if I chose a particular tool (or even a particular tool's version)? Or would that just affect the way (and possibly the performance) the SOAP messages are generated/processed and NOT their structure?
Phew! ;-) Thanks in advance!