.NET to J2EE interaction

["Soti, Dheeraj" <ds...@harris.com>]

Hi,

I have two tasks at hand. Exposing the middle-tier (j2ee) API so that UI (.NET)
clients can use it and publishing the public APIs so that anyone can build
solutions on top of my platform.

Initially I thought web services can be a way to do both of them but now I
learnt that web services should not be treated as distributed objects. I am pure
OO programmer using all the richness of its features like inheritance,
polymorphism, overloading. I can achieve some of them through rpc/encoded but
WS-I doesn't recommend it. Doc/literal wrapped is the recommended approach for
interoperability but that forces me to flatten out my objects and become kind of
non-OO (can't do overloading, polymorphism). Its fine to leave these features
for published APIs but for my .NET clients this will be kind of going back to
procedural programming era. J2EE & .NET are both OO aware so why should I have
to flatten my objects for them to interact. So I am almost beginning to feel
that web services is not the solution to my problem. 

Is someone aware of any better solution for this scenario (J2EE server and C#
.NET client communication). 

Thanks

Dheeraj Soti