I’ve been doing a lot of work exploring different methods to consume (.NET) web services in Java clients. It seems that this area is a black hole in Java. The easiest way that I have found is to use Apache Axis2 wsdl2java to generate the source files. But still, this requires some work to integrate Apache into my existing web applications.
I’m surprised that there is no easier way. Why is that?
Because there is. The required functionality for SOAP clients are included in the standard API library. You can use the wsimport tool (located in the bin directory of your JDK installation) to generate client classes from a specified WSDL.