Julian Bond in VoidStar asks "is WSDL useful?"  I personally was converted to believe in WSDL at the interopathon I hosted nine months ago.  Our goal was to flush out any compatibility issues between soap stacks.  While we did plenty of that, where we spent most of our time was resolving issues where people couldn't follow simple and clear directions.  People weren't sending things that weren't important to them but may be of vital importance to others (e.g. SOAPAction).  There were plenty of transcription errors (e.g. upper vs. lower case).  And in most cases, the error messages produced weren't helpful.  We spent a lot of time looking at wire dumps.

Those stacks that either could make use of WSDL to create a starting point (proxy, skeleton, etc); or could use WSDL dynamically to "fill in the blanks" seemed to have the least trouble.  At the time, Apache's wasn't one of them. We've since corrected that in Axis alpha 3 with JAX RPC support..

  7:42:36 AM