Wise… how I decided to develope a generic WS client

It was more than 2 years ago when the company I work for decided to develope some webservices to provide b2b integration with other companies willing to make use of our services for their own systems.
We were using JBoss since its early releases (2.x), so we based our webservice solutions on jboss-net.
I was one of the guy in charge of developing those services, so I soon realized that one of the biggest issues would have been their testing phase considering there were a lot of wsdls, a lot of operations, and so on. Moreover our quality and business analisys team wasn’t offcourse at ease or simply wasn’t able to generate clients of those webservice in order to test and validate them.
My boss, Stefano, bought a license of Mindreef Soapscope for this purpose, but it soon became clear that it was not exactly what we were looking for: first of all it wasn’t free , it needed a Windows host to be deployed on (while we’ve always used *nix), it had some use restrictions and a lot of features we didn’t need… and, last but not the least, it wasn’t simple enough to be used by a non-programmer.
Considering that we couldn’t find any good alternative to soapscope (excepting generating java clients for each wsdl we would have exposed), I started to think to a web application to be deployed on JBoss: it should have been able to dynamically generate soap requests and parse soap responses for a given webservice and to allow us to edit requests without being a programmer (no java or soap specification knowledge).
I realized a prototype; it has been widely used by our company for more than one year, but a couple of month ago with webservice specifications evolving and becoming more clear, JBoss releasing JBossWS, … we realized that we needed something more than a prototype, more robust and supporting most of the recent webservice specifications (think about attachments, WS-* specs, rpc/encoded not beeing supported anymore, …).
Somebody else recently felt the lack of a simple, light application to test webservice through (let’s consider SoapUI, for example), however I still can’t find nothing that really convince me, so I’m currently working on Wise and soon I’ll post its features in detail… and make it available to you