I was thinking of the case for server-to-server communication, and for such a case, having the ablity to generate the client stubs would be a big win in simplifying the development process for soap-based services.
For example, I've been working on a news-feed package that uses soap services to transfer news items from a news instance on one server to news instance on another server. Basically it is just a specialized service for copying CR items from one server to another. To develop the soap service, I prototyped it using my web-services package (based on nsjava and apache-axis), and then when I was happy with the design, I converted the soap calls to tcl. In the tcl implmentation, I store message templates with placeholders for interpolating the data necessary for creating the soap message, and then on the receiving end, I use ns_xml to parse the received messages. The soap messages are parsed by a specialized request processor that is hard-coded for the news-feed service. The tcl implementation is lightweight and, other than the network, there is no perceptible delay.
Having your package would have saved me some work in writing the soap request processor, but I would still be left with quite a bit of work for creating the client stubs. As you probably already know, the axis implementation allows you to write a java interface class and use a utility to generate a wsdl file. Then, there also is another utility that takes the wsdl file as an input and generates all of the client stubs and server skeleton code based on the wsdl description. So all a developer has to do, is write a java interface class, generate the wsdl, client stubs and server skeleton code, and the fill in the server skeleton implementation to create a web-service.
For your package, the approach seems to be to write the server implementation utilizing @Idl tags in the document section of ad_proc to describe the interface, and then using information from those tags you generate a wsdl description that soap toolkits can use to generate the client stubs. Possibly tcl-based client stubs could be generated by tclsoap from the wsdl description? Has anybody looked into this?
I'm thinking that the server-to-server type applications will proabaly be the most valuable, so if you can add support for generating client stubs and complex types, your soap gateway package will become really useful for building openacs-based web services.
