Wrapping Web-Services for COM

Question

I have zero experience with COM. I actually never thought, I'll need to do something with COM, thinking it's something that I luckily managed to avoid. Oh, well.

I need to create a wrapper for Web Services, which could be used from COM. I was hoping, that it's a solved problem, but failed to find an easy solution (for example: just generating a wrapper from WSDL).

A sidenote: Apparently, I also can't use .NET Framework (I could solve my problem easily with the help of COMVisible attribute, right?), unless I'll prove, that it's not that hard to install it on hundreds of machines. Proving that seems easier than my other alternatives at the moment. Today is a weird day.

Answer 1

You can call a Web Service from just about anywhere, including VB6 and COM.

If you can create an XMLHTTP60 COM object, here's an SO answer that shows you how to use it: What is the best way to consume a web service from VB6?

Answer 2

Take a look at Python; it's almost trivial to create a COM server from Python (compared to most of the non-MS languages, at least), and it makes as good a COM client as any other language.

If your Web service isn't already written, it's also fairly easy to write them in Python as well.