Consuming of WebServices by Java Applications

I have been architecting webservice solutions in Production for 2 years now and I have both .Net and Java clients. Developing in .Net means that there is little to no additional effort with working with .Net clients. Proxy generation goes smoothly just about everytime. There are a few subtle nuances with working with the WSESettings plugin for VS.Net but overall it is pretty smooth.

However, working with Java clients is a bit hit or miss. For example, I am working on an Interactive TV Project (very cool project) that is using the Glue tool now owned by WebMethods to consume my webservices. This Java tool cannot handle properties of type DateTime or Enumeration when they are defined as attributes in the WSDL contract. They must be elements which is against our present standard (simple types as attributes...complex types as elements). I modified the contract to accomodate them...but it is always something with Java clients (Glue does have a serious leg-up on handling exceptions relative to .Net 1.1 so the same can be said for .Net i am sure.)

On my side I have used BEA's IDE and was very impressed with its intuitive ease of use but I don't know how compliant it is with the WSDL spec and interacting with .Net webservices. Anyone out there know of a java good tool.

It would be nice to have an independent site judge different releases of tools (.net and java...maybe i will put this on the next iteration of my site) and get comments and articles from developers about how well a particular tool works....

-Mathew Nolton