JRuby and soap4r :: its the only way to live ...

Oh yeah I got them working nicely!
Although I have to hack httpclient (I know there must be a way not to hack it!). Some if not most of the posts/tutorials out there might or might not work. So here's how I got it working.

I have to implement this functionality requiring to invoke a web service. The developer I was working with gave me a rpc/encoded wsdl file (as oppose to a document literal). (What's the fuzz is rpc/encoded & document literal???)

Now there are two ways to use soap4r: read the wsdl at runtime and invoke its method(s) dynamically or create the stubs with your local wsdl file. In my case, I chose to create the stubs (consumer) using wsdl2ruby which comes with soap4r. Here's how you can install soap4r and generate the stubs.

Now for the fun part ...

• If you start your rails app and fails because of jruby-openssl missing, you probably need to modify ssl_config.rb and set SSLEnabled to false (from httpclient gem). httpclient is a dependency of soap4r.
• As mentioned above, soap4r generates you .rb files (4 of them), you actually only need the *driver.rb in your code. To give you an idea how to use it, have a look at the generated client stub (*Client.rb).
  
• Authentication => Since the web service I was trying to invoke requires me to do basic authentication, I have to pass in options to my driver object.

my_object.options["protocol.http.basic_auth"] << [MY_ENDPOINT, MY_ENDPOINT_USERNAME, MY_ENDPOINT_PASSWORD]

• Testing => so aside from doing your unit test, what I found helpful was testing the web service using soapUI. soapUI generates a service request as well as a dummy service for you based on your wsdl file. There are many tutorials out there that would surely help you.
  

That's about it for getting JRuby and soap4r to work together. I know there's a way to get httpclient gem to work without hacking into it or maybe I just misconfigured it. If you found a way to solve this issue, feel free to comment on my post.

Cheers!