Java SOAP client with non-wsdl mode

Question

I wrote an client/server application to delegate jobs from an centralized server with jobqueue to a lot of clients. Clients request information/jobs from the server and send new information/jobs (some parameters arrays, with sometimes up to 8000 array-elements) to the server.

The client and server are in PHP using SOAP in non-wsdl mode so far.

This is the example (unfortunately in German) I used: http://www.ordix.de/ORDIXNews/3_2008/Open_Source/PHP5_SOAP_WebServices.html

This works fine. But now I want to optimize the client side(e.g. implement multithreading) and switch the clients to Java.

I'm not very expierenced in Java. So I searched the web for many hours to find a simple but not to old school solution. Ideally where I do not have to touch the server script.

Now I'm a little bit confused. I found Apache XML-RPC as obsolete library. JAX-RPC is now integrated in JAX-WS and at first sight a little bit to complex.

With Redstone XML-RPC I found another alternative but don't really know if this is the solution for me.

Before learning the ropes.. Is one of my mentioned libraries a good way to consume my non-wsd SOAP server script by a Java SOAP client?

This is exactly the question I wanted to ask, but isn't answered so far: Easiest way to write a Java SOAP client that consumes a non-wsdl PHP SOAP server?

Thank you in advance for bringing light into the dark!

Answer 1

My understanding is that you want to send custom SOAP requests over HTTP to the web service without using wsdl generated stubs etc.
This is possible.
Check out the Dispatch API in jax-ws or CXF
jax-ws-dispatch
Dispatch Client
You can use axis2 also.
But you can also use SAAJ and create SOAP objects with your XML to send to server and get the response.