Hi!
alex achike wrote:Just to help my imagination further, do I control the response once it comes back from the service? Put another way, do I need to generate the veiw (JSP) or does it generate it to complete the request?
A web service usually return only data, not a visual presentation of the data. Your application will, most likely, take the data returned from the external web service and perhaps do some additional procesing before rendering a web page.
I hear about using apache axis (never used it before btw), will this be necessary and does it do most of the work?
If you just want to develop a web service client, then you do not need Axis or any other web service stack. All you need is included in JavaSE 6.
If you do want to develop a web service, my personal advise is to choose some other web service stack. Metro, the reference implementation of JAX-WS, is very easy to work with. It is included as the default web service stack in GlassFish, there is excellent tooling in NetBeans, it can be used in a
Tomcat instance if you feel GlassFish is too large.
Best wishes!