JAX-RPC client with Maven2

Recently I needed to make my Maven2 web project communicate with an old style RPC encoded web service. We run on GlassFish which comes with JAX-RPC RI built-in, so I was hoping to find a way to use it without having to bundle another runtime such as Axis into the project. Specifically I was looking for a way to make my build-script generate client stubs from a WSDL file in the project tree. I want the client stubs to use standardized JAX-RPC APIs which are serviced by the implementation provided by GlassFish.

I found that the JAX-WS RI has a Maven2 plugin but not the JAX-RPC RI. I did a lot of googling, and posted messages in a few mailing lists. Surprisingly there is almost nobody using JAX-RPC on Maven2 projects because there are barely any examples online and nobody could answer my question. I'm surprised because there are a lot of legacy systems out there that developers need to integrate with, so I can't be the only one still needing JAX-RPC support. Some people suggested that I update the web service to modern RPC literal to make client-side development easier with JAX-WS, but that is not an option. Others suggested that I use Maven's antrun plugin to call out to an ant build script that does JAX-RPC work. Finally I found an all Maven solution that works for me:

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.apache.axis</groupId>
   <artifactId>axis</artifactId>
   <version>1.4</version>
   <scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
   <groupId>org.apache.axis</groupId>
   <artifactId>axis-jaxrpc</artifactId>
   <version>1.4</version>
   <scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
   <groupId>commons-discovery</groupId>
   <artifactId>commons-discovery</artifactId>
   <version>0.4</version>
   <scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
   <groupId>wsdl4j</groupId>
   <artifactId>wsdl4j</artifactId>
   <version>1.6.2</version>
   <scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>

<plugin>
   <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
   <artifactId>axistools-maven-plugin</artifactId>
   <version>1.3</version>
   <executions>
       <execution>
           <goals>
               <goal>wsdl2java</goal>
           </goals>
       </execution>
   </executions>
   <configuration>
       <packageSpace>com.mycompany.service.client</packageSpace>
       <sourceDirectory>src/main/resources/META-INF/wsdl</sourceDirectory>
       <outputDirectory>target/generated-sources/wsdl2java</outputDirectory>
   </configuration>
</plugin>

private MyServiceSEI getMyServicePort() throws ServiceException {
   MyServiceLocator locator = new MyServiceLocator();
   MyServiceSEI port;
   Stub stub;

   port = locator.getMyServiceSEIPort();

   // OPTIONALLY configure URL and HTTP BASIC authentication
   stub = (Stub) port;
   stub._setProperty(Stub.ENDPOINT_ADDRESS_PROPERTY, "http://hostname/ContextRoot/ServicePort");
   stub._setProperty(Stub.USERNAME_PROPERTY, "user");
   stub._setProperty(Stub.PASSWORD_PROPERTY, "secret");

   return port;
} 

It works, but I think the client stubs are dependent on the Axis 1 runtime instead of using the GlassFish provided JAX-RPC runtime through the standardized JAX-RPC APIs. I've wasted enough time on this so I moved on. If you know a better way to do this, please let me know. No RESTful services rants please! I think SOAP and REST both have their uses depending on what you are doing. From my perspective, JAX-WS SOAP development is effortless and requires significantly less code than REST because I don't have to write the building/parsing code. After examining raw SOAP messages without extra WS-* headers added in, I decided that overhead is not a valid argument against SOAP. When you need more advanced features they are available to you without having to re-invent the wheel. I think most Java developers' negative impressions on SOAP comes from the JAX-RPC and Axis days, and because they haven't tried JAX-WS yet.

From http://www.ryandelaplante.com/