can java consume .NET object returned by ASP.NET web service?

Question

i have an ASP.NET web service that returning a custom entity object (Staff):

[WebMethod]
public Staff GetStaffByLoginID(string loginID){}

how would i consume this in Java?

thanks!

Answer 1

Just use Standard WSDL as mentioned by flyswat if you are using traditional asmx web services.

other solutions if not using standard ASP.NET Web Services:

Use REST

http://www.infoq.com/articles/REST-INTEROP

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/XML/WSfromJava.aspx

Make sure the objects are serializable and as long as the you can cast it to a similar class on the Java side, you are good. Else, you might have to write some custom class mappers in Java.

Answer 2

You may be able to do this by running Java on IKVM.

Answer 3

ASP.NET automatically generates a WSDL that contains the interface definitions for your web methods and the types they consume/return.

Apache Axis provides a tool called WSDL2Java that will generated the all of the code you need to consume the webservice. Simply point it to:

http://yoursite.com/YourWebService.asmx?WSDL

If you browse directly to the .ASMX file, you'll get a nice test harness that you can use to explore the various methods you can call.

Once Axis reads your WSDL, it will generate some proxy classes, one of them will be based on the interface of Staff.

However, I would not use this class as your actual business object, and instead would wrap access to the web service through a service layer. This service layer would use the proxy Staff class to populate your real business object.

This protects your consuming code from any interface changes that may happen to the web service in the future, keeping the actual area of code that would be modified as small as possible.

I do this for a living, interopping between Java and .NET on many platforms using SOAP.

EDIT: Why the is this downvoted? It's the only correct answer here.