Calling a JAX-WS webservice from inside Matlab

I have a Vanguard webservice which I can call (using basic authentication) using a custom java class. The java wsimport tool was used to generate the java proxy stubs and this all works perfectly.

The java code (All classes below are generated by wsimport given a url + authentication info):

Authenticator.setDefault(new SimpleAuth(username,pass)); 
MyWSObject obj = new MyWSObject(url);         -> triggers the exception
ServicePortType port = obj.getServicePort();
OutputType result = port.MyWSMethod(params);
OutputData data = result.getOutputData();

When I run the exact same java function (containing the above code) from matlab the webservice call fails with an obscure error:

??? Java exception occurred:
com.sun.xml.internal.ws.streaming.XMLStreamReaderException: XML reader error: com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxUnexpectedCharException:
Unexpected character '"' (code 34) in DOCTYPE declaration; expected a space between public and system identifiers

at [row,col,system-id]:
[1,63,"<my webservice url>"]
        at com.sun.xml.internal.ws.streaming.XMLStreamReaderUtil.wrapException(XMLStreamReaderUtil.java:256)
at com.sun.xml.internal.ws.streaming.XMLStreamReaderUtil.next(XMLStreamReaderUtil.java:84)
at com.sun.xml.internal.ws.streaming.XMLStreamReaderUtil.nextContent(XMLStreamReaderUtil.java:99)
at com.sun.xml.internal.ws.streaming.XMLStreamReaderUtil.nextElementContent(XMLStreamReaderUtil.java:89)
at com.sun.xml.internal.ws.wsdl.parser.RuntimeWSDLParser.hasWSDLDefinitions(RuntimeWSDLParser.java:209)
at com.sun.xml.internal.ws.wsdl.parser.RuntimeWSDLParser.parse(RuntimeWSDLParser.java:119)
at com.sun.xml.internal.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.parseWSDL(WSServiceDelegate.java:254)
at com.sun.xml.internal.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.<init>(WSServiceDelegate.java:217)
at com.sun.xml.internal.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.<init>(WSServiceDelegate.java:165)
at com.sun.xml.internal.ws.spi.ProviderImpl.createService开发者_开发技巧Delegate(ProviderImpl.java:93)
at javax.xml.ws.Service.<init>(Service.java:56)
at edu.soton.decode.activities.vanguardws.MyWSObject.<init>(MyWSObject.java:42)
at edu.soton.decode.activities.VanguardActivity.execute(VanguardActivity.java:80)

If I use wireshark to monitor the requests/reponses in both cases I see:

== Java function called directly ==

All the calls/reponses below happen automatically by the JAX-WS code generated by wsimport. My code just calls the webservice method on the generated service proxy, nothing fancy.

GET /bin/ws.dsb?wsdl/mywebservice HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Java/1.6.0_22
Host: myhost
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2
Connection: keep-alive
...

HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required
Server: Vanguard Server/5.1.10
Connection: close
Content-Length: 608
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:04:17 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:04:17 GMT
Expires: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:04:17 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Local Library"
Auto-Studio-Login: 0
Content-Type: text/html
...

GET /bin/ws.dsb?wsdl/mywebservice HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Java/1.6.0_22
Host: myhost
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2
Connection: keep-alive
Authorization: Basic Z29yaXNzZW46ZGlyaw==
...

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Vanguard Server/5.1.10
Connection: close
Content-Length: 5408
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:04:17 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:04:17 GMT
Expires: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:04:17 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache
Set-Cookie: KillIDws=lpvovmb3oa9; path=/
Content-Type:text/xml
...

POST /bin/ws.dsb?soap/mywebservice HTTP/1.1
Content-type: text/xml;charset="utf-8"
Soapaction: ""
Accept: text/xml, multipart/related, text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2
User-Agent: JAX-WS RI 2.1.6 in JDK 6
Host: myhost
Connection: keep-alive
Authorization: Basic Z29yaXNzZW46ZGlyaw==
Content-Length: 214
...

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Vanguard Server/5.1.10
Connection: close
Content-Length: 851
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:04:18 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:04:18 GMT
Expires: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:04:18 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache
Set-Cookie: KillIDws=lpvovmb3oi2; path=/
Content-Type:text/xml; charset=utf-8
...

-> the last response is where the results are returned

== Exactly the same Java function called from inside Matlab ==

GET /bin/ws.dsb?wsdl/mywebservice HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Language: en
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Java 1.6.0_22; Windows XP 5.2 amd64; en_GB) ICEbrowser/v6_0_2
Host: myhost
Connection: Keep-Alive
...

HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required
Server: Vanguard Server/5.1.10
Connection: close
Content-Length: 608
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:02:42 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:02:42 GMT
Expires: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:02:42 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Local Library"
Auto-Studio-Login: 0
Content-Type: text/html
...

-> everything stops here with the exception shown above. So when running inside Matlab, it seems Matlab is doing something to the JVM environment that stops the generated proxy from making a second, authenticated call. It simply bails out after the 401 instead of authenticating like in the pure java case.

I have set MATLAB_JAVA environment variable so that the same JVM (sun 1.6) is used in both cases. I have also noticed that Matlab does not respect the http.agent property when sending requests.

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It turns out that the problem only seems to occur on 64bit versions of Matlab on non-linux platforms. It works fine if I install a 32bit version of Matlab. I am going to mark this question as answered since this seems to be a problem with Matlab and Mathworks are investigating the issue (thread id: 1-DUMQQZ]).

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If proxy settings are responsible for the issue, the following static methods can be used for configuration.

% configure
java.lang.System.getProperties().put('http.proxyHost', 'your.proxy');
java.lang.System.getProperties().put('http.proxyPort', 'port number');
java.lang.System.getProperties().put('http.proxyUser', 'name');
java.lang.System.getProperties().put('http.proxyPassword', 'password');

java.lang.System.getProperties().put('http.proxySet', 'true');

% verify
java.lang.System.getProperty('http.proxyHost')
java.lang.System.getProperty('http.proxyPort')
java.lang.System.getProperty('http.proxyUser')
java.lang.System.getProperty('http.proxyPassword')

% test
urlread('http://www.yahoo.com/')

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ICEbrowser, which MATLAB still uses on some platforms for HTML rendering, inserts some of its own classes into global VM settings. This may work for you if you never open the Help Browser in the current session.