Microsoft WCF Web Services & Java

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:43:16 +0000

I spent a good 50+ hours on trying to consume a Microsoft WCF secure web service with a Java solution. I tried Spring Web Services, Axis2, and looked at Metro/Tango and decided Axis2 was the "easiest" solution. The web service I'm connecting to implements WS-Security, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Policy, WS-Trust and WS-Addressing (at least) and it's provided through a .NET 3.5 WCF endpoint.

It doesn't work.

Axis2 can't handle SpNego which is a WCF closed protocol allowing two WCF machines to negotiate the credentials between them. The client has spent way too much money paying me to continue to figure out a Java solution, so I wrote a .NET 3.5 C# client. Took me literally five lines of code and it's working. That's great for .NET developers but a whole lotta horse shit for the rest of the world. I'm hoping Axis2's Rampart module is updated to play nice with WS-SecureConversation and a .NET WCF web service. Until then, I'm using the .NET client to download the data and I'm storing the SOAP body into a database table. On the Java side, I'm still using JAXB2 to unmarshall the data into Java objects and process it through our existing persistence framework.

Web Services on The Dangling Pointer

Microsoft WCF Web Services & Java