I am investigating about different approaches to call an external web service from PL/SQL and I stumbled upon this rather old how-to document:
Calling a Web Service From The Database
The document explains how to create a web service proxy in Java with JDeveloper and how to deploy it to a database.
The sample service is relatively simple. The service I need to call exposes many methods that returns and requires complex objects as parameters, but I have found further hints in the following piece of Oracle documentation:
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B19306_01/java.102/b14187/chsix.htm#BABBEAJI
So I downloaded and installed the latest JDeveloper and I get a working web service proxy in a snap. When I tried to deploy it to my old database (Oracle 10.0.2.5 running Java 1.4) I've got the errors listed in the attached log (sorry for class names in Italian).
As the last line states, it seems I am experiencing some sort of compatibility problem between the Java version I used to build the proxy and the one available on my server. If I, as suggested, switch the JDK version from 1.7 to 1.4 I get an error stating something like "You used data annotation, but this feature is available only from Java 1.5".
Is there a way to force JDeveloper to generate a web service proxy "1.4 friendly"?