I have a WSDL published on an application server somewhere. I would like to write a webservice client that uses the WSDL to send requests and recieve responses. I have not done this before, and most of the tutorials assume you have the code for the webservice.
What is the most straight forward way to do that?
Use jax-ws to generate a client for the web service end point. There is a tool called "wsimport" which will do that for you.
Given a wsdl, it will generate all the client artifacts that you need to call the web service programmatically using Java.
See here for more details- http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/tools/share/wsimport.html