How to Call methods I see in a wsdl file someone linked me to?

Question

Hi all,

I am not a Java programmer by trade. C and Fortran mostly. However, I have this one-off project someone wants done. Connect to some web-based database and retrieve some data from it. I asked around, and someone finally linked me to a WSDL page. I click on this link, and I see a huge XML looking file.

If I am writing a stand-alone java application, how do I go about calling these (promising looking) method names that I see in the wsdl. You know "getCoordinates" is there, but i have no idea how to call that method. After googling, I am finding a lot of different ways, and I am not sure what is the best way for my simple application.

Thanks

Answer 1

When you start working with webservices you should get eviware's soapUI as a standalone app just to test and play with the services. This might give you a feeling on how webservices work in general.

Then you should use a library like apache axis to use the services. You usually don't have to talk 'xml'. Typically you create a java stub that represents the service in terms of methods and objects and use the stub as normal java classes. Theres a wsdl2java tool that does the creation of the stub for you.