RPG as a Web Service Consumer

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm cross posting this in a few places, so if you see multiple copies of
this, please forgive me.  This is a rather unusual request in that in
researching the net (including archives, Google, mail scans, you name
it) I haven't found ANYTHING about the subject anywhere.  Since it
crosses several domains, I thought I'd give it a shot in multiple
places.

My question is this: has anybody tried calling a web service directly
from RPG?  I can't believe it's that difficult; it's simply a sockets
communication.  But I can find no examples anywhere.  I suppose I can
reverse engineer the Java client WDSC generated for me, but that seems
like overkill (especially after I looked at the code <shudder>).

It's not like it's crucial.  I can always call a Java program to do the
work.  But we all know the performance downsides of invoking Java from
RPG; it would be nice to be able to do it directly from RPG.

What do you all think?

Joe