ANN: IBM Web Services Invocation Framework posted to alphaWorks

The IBM Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) is a tool that provides a
standard API for invoking services described in Web Services Description
Language (WSDL), no matter how or where the services are provided. WSIF
enables developers to interact with WSDL representations of Web services
instead of working directly with the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
APIs, which is the usual programming model for Web Services now.

The architecture allows new WSDL bindings to be added or replaced at run
time, currently available are SOAP bindings for ApacheSOAP 2.2 
(or SoapRMI 1.1) and Java local invocation binding.

The programmer has a choice to use WSIF API directly and invoke Web
Services dynamically or use portType compiler to generate a stub, a Java
interface translated from WSDL portType and Java beans that correspond to
types defined in WSDL (only limited subset of XML schema type is supported).
The generated stub conveniently hides underlying WSIF invocations but
still allows the user to select WSDL port or even to provide a customized
port implementation in runtime.

We have provided example of simple stub-less invoker that allows to invoke
any WSDL described service passing WSDL location, operation name and 
arguments (if any) on command line. There are also included two samples 
demonstrating how to invoke standard stockquote and addressbook over
SOAP and as local Java services.

The toolkit can be run on any Java platform (JDK 1.2 or greater) and
pre-reqs JAXP 1.1-compliant XML parser. For SOAP binding Apache SOAP 2.2
is required (samples can be modified to use SoapRMI dynamic provider and
then SoapRMI 1.1 BETA11 or higher is required) To use ability to
dynamically obtain WSIF port implementations for stubs from JNDI it is
required to have JNDI classes (they are standard in JDK 1.3 or greater).

The toolkit is available at:
    http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/wsif

We look forward to receiving comments!

Alek