KWPro.net

I had an interesting little assignment today.  We're going to be launching an API service via SOAP web services and my boss asked me to take a look at it.  The documentation was geared towards Java so it gave me a chance to open Eclipse again and take a stab at it.

Admittedly, my previous company left a horribly bitter (pun intended) taste in my mouth regarding Java so it had been a while since I poked at it.  Getting Eclipse to work can be a real pain in the ass.  Java itself is bulky, leaks memory and Eclipse is a horrible offender in this regard.  I had to hand install Eclipse since the updates via Callisto kept failing on the Ubuntu version.

After a lot of tweaking, I managed to hook Eclipse up with the correct plugins.  Finally, the plugin installer had improved by doing something smart in looking for all the plugins' dependencies.  That was a very nice updated feature.  I grabbed a lot of the standard web development and J2EE stuff.  On top of that, I grabbed Axis2, an Apache SOAP implementation.

The tutorial was a bit flakey initially and took sometime to get up and running.  But the Axis2 plugin is really nice.  Given a simple POJO style class, it'll generate the appropriate server side file for you.  Then once you get your wsdl url, you can plug it back into the client piece and it'll generate all the stub files for you.  Very slick!

Now, I'm not a huge fan of Java because I find the language to be bulky and inflexible at times.  However, many of the tools tend to compensate, sometimes better than other scripting languages.  This is one instance where I was fairly impressed.  Now, if they can only do something about those Eclipse memory leaks....