Invoking Web Services without proxy classes

All of the code examples that I have seen for WSDL assume that the
actual communication between the service user and the service provider
take place using proxy classes that have been generated, either at
development time or at run time, by developers or (more often) through
the use of one of the WSDL-to-Java tools.

It seems to me that there may be some situations where (a) it is not
possible to create the proxy classes at development time and (b) it is
not possible or desirable to generate proxies at runtime. I think it
should be feasible to use the WSDL definitions directly to set up the
messages, etc, instead of using proxy classes, but so far I haven't seen
any code showing this.

So: is it feasible for a service user to read WSDL interface and
implementation descriptions and then invoke the service without using
proxy classes? If not, why not? And if so, can someone point me to some
sample code that I can use to get started?

Thanks in advance.


Steven Gollery
sgollery@cadrc.calpoly.edu

Received on Monday, 7 January 2002 12:18:38 UTC