What is the least painful way to consume SOAP web services in Java

Question

Most projects, we seem to do some kind of SOAP web service consumption. And every time, it feels like being hit repeatedly over the head with a brick. For example, we end up with:

• Dozens of generated classes our developers barely understand
• Awkward APIs (especially when consuming .NET web services)
• Hacks to deal with the fact that we normally generate from a local WSDL file (the remote service rarely exists at the time we start development)

In Python, I've used Suds (https://fedorahosted.org/suds), which provides a really natural (but obviously less type-safe) API. I know this is comparing apples and oranges, but there has got to be a less painful way to call a remote web service than generating so much code.

We'll probably use this in the Play framework for the time being, although I'd like something generic if possible. We also use Spring a lot, although I'm looking into Guice right now for a simpler alternative.

Martin

Answer 1

i've had pretty good experience using the apache axis2 librarys. Any point against those?

(forgot the link: http://axis.apache.org/axis2/java/core/ )

Answer 2

Check Apache CXF (http://www.coderanch.com/t/224490/Web-Services/java/Axis-Vs-CXF). It is very easy to use.