Printable Version of Topic

Introduction
This article will be useful if you need to consume ASP.NET webservices from languages or platforms without .NET support. In this example, I am consuming a webservice from a Java applet, but it would take very little work to adapt my code to run as a Java application. Although I have only tested this on Windows XP, the code should run on other platforms, providing cross-platform client-side consumption of ASP.NET webservices.

I developed this solution because I needed to add complex client-side processing to my ASP.NET application. I did not want to have to cope with all of the slightly different JavaScript implementations used by the main browsers, and this led me to consider a Java applet.

This article shows you how to use a Java applet in your webpage and get it to communicate back to ASP.NET by consuming an XML webservice on the client.