Where does WSDL fit in ?

[Shahed A Moolji <sh...@enoor.com>]

Hi,

I am new to Soap, but have been watching it for almost a year.

Corret me if I am wrong, but is the following analogy correct ?

1. UDDI is somewhat similar to the Java RMI Registry
2. WSDL is something like CORBA's IDL, and the wsdl2java mapping is like
     the RMI client Stub.
3. The SOAP server is like an ORB
4. SOAP-RPC over HTTP is like IIOP

Now, I have been looking at apache soap, and I dont see  WSDL
anywhere.

I ran some java client to java server (Stock Quote) samples last year,
and I dont remember how the client knew what methods to execute on the
server,
return types etc. (I think they were hard coded ??)

Anyway, so without WSDL, how can a client know what is out there ?
How does Apache Soap work without WSDL ?

Thanks
Shahed