Personally, I would advise you to knuckle down, study WSDL, write it and generate stubs and 
skeletons from that.

WSDL 1.1 gets a lot of bad press because it got the trade-off between expressivity and flexi
bility on the one hand and
verboseness and complexity wrong. Nonetheless, it is the only tool for expressing the contra
ct between a web service and
its clients.

A white paper from Karniak (http://www.omniopera.com/omniopera_whitepaper.html) lends some m
ore weight to the argument
you should write your WSDL, not generate it.

Here are some references about WSDL 1.1:

http://www.goland.org/wsdl.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnwebsrv/html/wsdlexplained.asp
http://www.capescience.com/articles/commonerrors/index.shtml
http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2002/02/20/endpoints.html

I would also recommend reading the W3C note defining WSDL 1.1 (http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl) an
d the WS-I Basic Profile
Approval Draft (http://www.ws-i.org/Profiles/Basic/2003-01/BasicProfile-1.0-WGAD.html). Whil
e I would question the
wisdom of the balkanization of standards through organizations like the WS-I, they actually 
did a pretty good job in
clarifying some of the darker recesses of WSDL 1.1. I do not like the fact that they focus a
ll their attention on SOAP,
but that is not an issue here since I understand that your services are or will be accessibl
e via SOAP.

I have briefly used tools from Cape Clear (http://www.capeclear.com) and Karniak (http://www
.omniopera.com/index.html).
Both tools are free. You can use them standalone, but Cape Clear's tool can also be used in 
the integrated web services
development tool suite.
Another free tool integrated in the Eclipse environment is the Improve WSDL Viewer for Eclip
se, available from
http://www.improve-technologies.com.
Currently only an alpha version is available for Eclipse 2.1; I have not tried it.
All these tools hide the WSDL syntax for you which may initially seem a good thing.
However, I found that tackling a substantial job, hiding syntax becomes irrelevant as you wa
nt to keep strict control
over what is stated in the WSDL, much as a professional web site builder may do the outline 
of a site with a graphical
editor but will want to control the exact HTML produced as well.
My current favorite tool is Altova's XML Spy. The great thing about that is that you can gen
erate SOAP (client) messages
direct from your WSDL description, send it to the server and inspect the results. It has obv
ious limitations such as
- only support for SOAP bindings,
- no checking of validity of the server's response against the WSDL,
but what is there is enough to put it streaks ahead of the competitors if you are using SOAP
 bindings.
		
hth,

Yo

On Tue, 29 Apr 2003 22:26:06 -0000, "Sean" wrote:





I've recently downloaded Apache soap, sucesfully installed it, wrote 
a service, wrote a client, everything worked great.

Then, the real world interfered. My trading partner uses .NET, and 
wants to use doc/literal. And, he wants me to produce a WSDL file.

Not only am I back to square one, but the Oreilly book doesn't hardly 
cover this.

To reiterate, I'm on Apache SOAP, trading partner is .NET. Need to 
use doc/literal, and I need to produce a WSDL file.

Can ANYONE please point me in the right direction on where I can read 
up on this. 

Thanks,

Sean











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