Gar issues...

Today Vaughn and I tried to get the client for the amds service on my machine so we could develop against it. It didn't work.

First we tried to build his code on my machine, which failed because my machine is not his machine and therefore had a slightly different version of globus... or ant... or user setup... or some other variable that is yet to be discovered that usually pops up during the first couple of attempts like this.

Then we tried to bring over the gar he had built on his machine... and deploy it... only to have the client blow up whenever I tried to run it citing missing class exceptions... despite the fact that all the classes that should have been in the gar.

So, I am still wanting for an AMDS client, and the resulting checklist of code and build and configurion points is long and mildly upsetting. I'm wondering if making a quick little AXIS or CXF service would be worth it just so I could develop against the resulting classes and client examples while the Globus connections were ironed out.

I'm sure it will get sorted out eventually, but when I was working with Quicksilver, I had the benefit of having the service from day one. This time, I have build out a lot of the grid viewer on assumptions of how the client and service will behave, and I worry about increasing the chance of needing to refactor things once it gets booting and connected because my assumptions were off.

Oh well, growing pains. We'll get through it... and I'm sure what we make will be rather cool. It's just "that phase" in the project where things are going wacky all over the place when one was hoping they would just fall into place and it's extra difficult to take the calming breaths you need to collectedly analyze the situation.

I can access the PoiConDai WSDL... but it's returning "any"

So, I spent most of today putting together a little program to test the webservice.

I have gotten to the point where I can get the webservice to respond... and it seems to not be throwing any errors...

But there is a problem.

The return type of the webservice is marked as "any"

As opposed to laying out the return type and defining the structure of the object (which really should be the point of any webservice)... the WSDL defines the "any" type, therefore axis makes no attempts to seriealize or deserialize the object being returned, and I am pretty much going to have to go into the big bucket of XML parsing to deserialize all the data myself.

I might be able to patch the structure back into a local WSDL and regenerate the classes...now that I can read what the format is... and get AXIS to do it for me, but we'll see.

Maybe introduce has better metadata introspection, but I doubt it. Either way... it's a whole bunch of annoying extra work.