Wednesday, November 15, 2006
JAX-WS, Not Too Bad
So I have finally got connected to the outside web service using the JAX-WS tools in Netbeans. The big problem I had was the web service had some crazy ideas of how things should be done. The big trip up for me was how they used to mean put in an XML document here that wasn't mentioned anywhere in the WSDL but they told all about in the docs. Unfortunately JAX-WS can only read WSDL files and not docs meant for humans, at least not in this version, so I had so manual work to do.
All in all JAX-WS seems like a nice tool. My code to connect to the web service was just a handful of lines. The rest was all generated behind the scenes by Netbeans. It did take me reading through the generated code to figure out what was going on and to figure it out how it all works. I am not a big fan of lots of automated abstraction, but at least Netbeans makes it easy to get to the details if you need to and ignore it if you want to. Just like the Swing tools. The only gripe I have about Netbeans is that I could not use the my long running project I built from an existing ant script, I had to create a new project in order for Netbeans to allow me to consume web services with its tools.
All in all JAX-WS seems like a nice tool. My code to connect to the web service was just a handful of lines. The rest was all generated behind the scenes by Netbeans. It did take me reading through the generated code to figure out what was going on and to figure it out how it all works. I am not a big fan of lots of automated abstraction, but at least Netbeans makes it easy to get to the details if you need to and ignore it if you want to. Just like the Swing tools. The only gripe I have about Netbeans is that I could not use the my long running project I built from an existing ant script, I had to create a new project in order for Netbeans to allow me to consume web services with its tools.
