I have been working with Java for the last two weeks.
The plain vanilla Java is pretty poor when it comes to web services. Unless you are using a development platform, the road is rough.
The tools story is not that straight forward either. For code construction, there are the "n" eclipse projects, then there are about 6 different versions of IBM Websphere, the JBoss tools, the BEA, the open source camp, and so on.
Once you get your IDE, you will need an application server. Finding and choosing an application server in yet another adventure.
The space reminds me of the UNIX days. Even though Sun, HP, IBM, etc were all UNIX the variations made for unnecessary complexity and interop problems.
After doing the massive installations of the leading commercial Java platforms I came back to open source tools. Though it may not seem like it, I found this solution to be the lightest and simplest development environment.
I placed the installs at
http://autoid.mit.edu/pickup/Java/
1) Install
jdk-1_5_0_07-windows-i586-p.exe
2) Download and unzip (do not install)
apache-tomcat-5.5.17.zip
3) Download and unzip (do not install)
wtp-all-in-one-sdk-R-1.5.0-200606281455-win32.zip
4) Open WTP and run eclipse – no need to install
5) In eclipse create a new project, add a server, use the tomcat libraries – no need to install
6) When you run your samples, use the server you added through eclipse
Once I had everything in place, creating and firing my proxies was pretty smooth :) There are Java-to-.NET issues but I had taken care of those at the interop party.