[Java] JAX-RPC vs. ASMX (a few things I noticed)

Note: This is just a reflection, not a full comparison between the two. I don't have time to do a full review of JAX-RPC I'm afraid ;)

I dedicated yesterday to looking at JAX-RPC, which is supposed to be a pretty good and standardized way to build web services in Java. I didn't want to use a vendor specific implementation of JAX-RPC, so I downloaded Java Web Services Developer Pack (Java WSDP) from Sun, which has a decent tutorial and numerous examples. It took some hours to get everything going, but the Java WSDP has EVERYTHING you need to get going, except for the Java SDK and a proper editor.

Well what can I say. It's far from simple. Without proper tools that does the mapping and generation of class-files for you, it is more or less a mess and it's a total pain compared to how easy it is on the .NET platform. Even if you're not using VS.NET and doing it by hand using Notepad.

Good things about JAX-RPC is that most things seems to be doable with it. The coding part is dead easy and you can do Handlers (just like SoapExtensions in .NET) and stuff too. I noticed that default encoding seems to be rpc/encoded though.

What I need to stay sane is a good JAX-RPC plugin to intelli-j, eclipse, NetBeans or something. I'll continue to write small stuff about what I find in this field.