As mentioned in Web services, advances in client toolkits have nearly eliminated the need to manually write a Web service client from the WSDL file. There are client toolkits available that can generate most of the client interface directly from the WSDL for most major platforms, including:

  • Microsoft .NET
  • Apache Axis
  • OpenEdge

The proxies from these toolkits provide an API that generally appears as an interface to application functions. In fact, they provide an interface to messaging operations that hide the complexity of exchanging SOAP messages over HTTP.

Each client toolkit generates these proxies in a unique manner, but most create objects with methods. Usually, they create one object for each <portType> and one object for each <complexType> specified in the WSDL. Each client toolkit creates methods to generate and interpret SOAP messages appropriately for their platform.

All major client toolkits can generate a client interface from an OpenEdge Web service's WSDL file.