History

Wise has born some year ago during a project based on a lot of web services (hundreds of endpoints), with the goal to make service calls easier for non-technical people (aka QA) for business acceptance tests of our software.

Wise has born as a totally proprietary solution, parsing wsdls, constructing a web interface runtime and generating soap messages for requests and then parse soap responses to get it back to web interface.

Since the very beginning we keep in mind our audience, trying to make web service test and invocation possible without any knowledge of soap protocol and even XML. No XML to write (or even just to fill) no question about header to set for authentication ad so on; just give a wsdl URL to QA people, and wise makes their live easy making test just matter of put input on a user friendly interface and read results on the same web interface.

Of course that version works only (more or less) with our services, it didn't care too much of standards or interoperability because its goals were simple and it wasn't the main part project, but just a toy to simplify tests.

At the end of that project we continue to develop wise as open source project. We believe our approach to QA tests could have some places in webservice market. During our development we would move our legacy proprietary code to something more standard.

We have chosen to achieve this goal implementing a runtime JAXWS client generator, hacking wsconsume API (wsconsume is the name of jbossws implementation of wsimport). In a nutshell we use this API to generate client code and compile it runtime, then we push generated classes in current class loader and use them via reflection API to invoke webservices. Then we build a tree of classes designed to represent any kind of input/output parameter for soap;We use them in web user interface to collect input from users and get back to them results. That's basically the version downloadable from source forge and described in our site (http://www.javalinuxlabs.org/wise/index.html). The binay download contain a user manual too if you need more details.

Some months ago we think the core could be decoupled from web interface to become an API for generic webservices invocation. During this refactoring we add some cool features to our API like Smooks transformation and easy handlers management. I described some months ago what could be the future of wise on my blog, where I describe some of these features (http://www.javalinux.it/wordpress/?p=26)

Finally some weeks ago I wrote a JBossESB action using wise-core to implement a generic, zero-code webservice invocation. It is described on my blog (here: http://www.javalinux.it/wordpress/?p=43) and it's just one of possible applications of wise-core. This implementation have been added to JBoss 4.4 as we announced here: http://www.javalinux.it/wordpress/?p=82

End of the story.