groovy web service client

Question

I need to write a web service client in Groovy. The author of the web service has proposed various unappealing blobs of Java code that I could use to call the service from my Grails application.

At this point, I think it might be better if I just ask them to give me the WSDL and I'll take care of the client code myself. I'm looking for suggestions about the best way to go about writing a Groovy web service client using only a WSDL document?

I expect most suggestions will involve using some tool to generate a client-side API that I'll call from my Grails app. If so, then it's important that I can integrate generation of this API into a Grails build, because the WSDL document will probably change frequently.

I've looked at using GroovyWS which provides a very simple way of calling web services. However, it seems to lack any concept of a contract which concerns me from the point-of-view of testing. I would like to define a contract (interface) for the web service, for which I provide a real implementation that the app will use and a mock implementation that my unit tests will use.

Answer 1

Given your desire for more stability than the very dynamic GroovyWS, I'd suggest the easy way:

Use JAX-WS to generate a Java client , compile that and use it from Groovy. It's all statically typed and the generate Java source is reasonably clean (definitely much better than older WS client frameworks such as Axis 1).

Of course that would require that you have access to the WSDL.