Is it fair to say that the minimum requirement for a WSDL contract to be properly consumed by JBossWS is for the WSDL to be valid, and, if the WSDL is invalid, the behaviour is undetermined? I'm asking this because we changed the WSDL to simply return a string, and the new WSDL is still invalid, but it works now.
Yes. Exactly. Wsimport tool will treat the input wsdl as the valid one . Even the wsimport can generate code for the invalid wsdl without error, it still can not make sure it can be published/consume webservice service successfully. We need to make some enhancement in our documentation here to tell user the wsimport tool only accepts the valid wsdl , and suggest user uses eclipse WTP tool or other tool to validate wsdl before running the wsimport tool .
However, we can't expect it to work going forward if the WSDL is changed. Incidentally, the original WSDL is consumed with no problems by the JAX-WS reference implementation in standalone mode.
Is this original wsdl consumed by JBoss5.1.0 without problems too ?