coopernurse

This project attempts a middle ground between SOAP and "roll your own"

http://barrister.bitmechanic.com/

It's JSON-RPC with an IDL grammar.

Hey there. gorp author here. Happy to answer any questions about the package. MySQL support is the most well tested -- I added Postgresql and SQLite recently. Cheers.

Agreed. These problems (complex tooling, poor interop, non-human readable WSDL) were my motivation for writing Barrister RPC (a JSON-RPC implementation with a human readable IDL).

For those who find value in separating interface from implementation, you might take a gander.

http://barrister.bitmechanic.com/

Agreed. Once you use a language with type inference it's hard to go back to Java.

Java also lacks properties, which results in boilerplate getter/setters if you want to follow idiomatic convention (you could make all the member variables public, but your coworkers would probably shun you).