Hello all,
I need to design and implement a bridge like application between a legacy banking application and a web service. The banking application is written in ADABAS NATURAL and is on a UNIX platform.
Below is a sketch of my current design to explain the situation better:
+----------+ +----------+ | | UNIX | HTTP | Java | HTTP | Web
| ADABAS | <-------> | Web | <-------> | Service
| NATURAL | | App | |
+----------+ +----------+ |
Because of the inabilities of NATURAL version I wrote a C module that opens an HTTP connection to Java Web App and sends web service parameters as normal request parameters, and fetches the returned data to NATURAL.
Web application receives the parameters, in a large if-else block decides which method to call and using Axis generated proxy classes invokes the method. By using the returned object it prepares a very long formatted string and sends back. (Btw, Java Web Application is another host for security and performance related reasons.)
The number of methods is increasing a lot lately and there are a dozens of web services that we need to integrate with the banking application. Thus, it is getting difficult and extra boring to manually code method invocations. For these reasons I decided to implement a package that parses WSDL and automatically invokes methods by using request parameters and lots of reflection code. The only part left is generating the result string from the object returned by method invocation.
I have several questions: * Am I on the right way? * Is using Axis on the web application side favorable? * If favorable, should I choose an alternative to use proxy classes? * If not, which API should I learn and use? * And btw, why is parsing a WSDL is so hard?
I'm very new to whole web services stuff. I need your very valuable suggestions. For the last couple of days questions preoccupying my mind. :-\
Best regards. /tb.
