i have been doing some work with java to .net web service interoperability this
week. web services have the potential to be hugely powerful if they are used
correctly but if you want to do something simple between java and .net and you
want to use the “proper” tools (i.e. the apache axis class library or something
similar) the whole task takes on an entirely more difficult air.
i have ended up writing my own wrapper classes to submit the soap request and
parse the response because trying to write the deserialisation for even a
moderately complicated data type and still have the ability to run in domino is
well nigh impossible.
because this is the first time in a while that i have had the chance to write
some “serious” code i have taken full advantage and ended up doing two late
nights completely over-engineering the classes. luckily the work has already
paid off as someone overheard me moaning about the problems and they were
having exactly the same issue so they now have a brand spanking new set of
classes that do exactly what they were after as well.
