WS Implementation Question

First, apologies for posting on an architecture group a question that is
clearly about implementation.  The reason I am doing this is, as will
become apparent, I am totally unfamiliar with the platform in question
and I am hoping that someone will be kind enough to give me some helpful
hints.

We have a person here who is trying to provide some Web service
interfaces to specialized search functions on our corporate intranet,
with interop (consumption from .Net) an objective.  The specific search
engine involved is Inktome, which I believe has a Java API but no direct
Web services interfaces.  He does not seem to have available any of the
major development platforms that provide Web services in Java (e.g.
WebLogic, WebSphere, JBuilder), and I believe that he is using fairly
low level libraries in the Apache context.  It sounds like he is using
these low level calls to construct SOAP messages from the ground up, and
that he might intend to do something similar to make WSDL files.  This
sounds to me like an awful lot of work, and it also seems to me that it
potentially gets one into the difficulties of dealing with the very
detailed and potentially tricky issues covered by WS-I basic profile.

Can someone point me to some sort of development environment or
libraries likely to be available in this copntext that are a little
higher level -- so, for example, someone else has figured out how to
conform to WS-I?