Recently, I've been doing a lot with Oracle Application Express (APEX) and web services. At Oracle OpenWorld I came across a presentation on just this topic. Douwe Pieter van den Bos, an Oracle Ace, presented on using APEX with the Oracle SOA Suite. I have used SOA Suite in the past, and quite like it, but recently the web services I've been using are SOAP based services that I have very little influence on. They are not built with or deployed on the Oracle SOA Suite.

The SOAPEX presentation gave a nice overview of how to set up APEX to use web services and made the smart recommendation to build your web service references in a single application (SOAPEX) and then use the inherit/subscription model of APEX to keep things up to date.

My specific challenges have been a little more difficult, specifically in the need to consume very large and complicated web services--so complex (or possibly overly complicated) that APEX is unable to parse the wsdl. More on this later...