An Introduction to Java Web Services Programming

Oh, it's about how to make the service/server. I was hoping it went over how to make a client for somebody else's (SOAP/WSDL) service.

Making a client for SOAP is easy -- as long as you and your biz partner are using the same version of the same tool. God, I hate SOAP. Tweaking Axis to work with Visual Studio sucks.

There's a reason startups want to use REST, and leave the bodies of the "enterprise service bus" types out in the dumpster in the back parking lot :-)

JEE 6 helps a lot in make code cleaner and with less boilerplate.

I'm assuming this was posted as a joke, because the HN crowd is pretty anti-Java.

You can, of course, take easier approaches. With RESTEasy, for instance, you add a single line of configuration to web.xml then add the desired annotations to your POJOs and you are in business.

i am not anti-java. not at all. but to be honest, creating this simple web service shows really how complicated some things are in java.

Yes, when you go this route, it's very complicated. But good, user friendly frameworks have been built on top of these foundations, and those should be used.