At the start of this year I worked with some guys at eBay to further develop their code samples. Some, but not all of the twelve examples I wrote went live in the recently launched Community Codebase. You can download all the Java examples (of which I wrote three) or browse the Subversion repository. I wrote the SOAPAddItem, SOAPGetItem, and SOAPGetUser items in the Java source tree.

The examples I wrote were different from the majority of the (then) existing examples in that I didn’t make any IDE assumptions (most of the Java examples have JBuilder .jpx files and Eclipse .project files, the .NET projects contain the Visual Studio artifacts.. tsk tsk.) and as such, all the examples I wrote contain comprehensive Ant / NAnt build files which means you can get up and running without having to setup your fancy schmancy IDE. But the biggest difference was that all the examples I wrote used either Ant (with WSDL2Java) or NAnt (with NAntContrib) tasks to conditionally download the eBay WSDL, generate the client stub(s), and compile the resulting code, which makes for a prettier source code repository (generated stubs aren’t checked into source) and gives you compile time checking of your code against the API.

If you’re interested in how you can use Ant or NAnt in a build environment where you access SOAP services, you should check it out!