Rapid Web Service Construction with Groovy

I'm reading Thomas Erl's book, "Principles of Service Design" and, when he discusses contracts, they're usually codified in WSDL and XSD. So I've been trying to find a way to quickly throw together Web Services that use WSDL and XSD so that I can play with some of the book's concepts.

Failed Attempts

I thought that Ruby would be the answer. I first tried SOAP4R but found that it could not generate WSDL from service methods and types. Since I don't want to generate WSDL files yet, this was a deal-breaker.

I then tried Ruby's ActionWebService but the generator script was not installed correctly so it wouldn't work.

Success

I then stumbled upon Groovy's WSServer library (installation instructions). Groovy is a dynamic language that runs on the JVM. I installed the Groovy support for Eclipse and had created a fully working web service in minutes. I fired up the Web Service from within Eclipse and then switched over to Microsoft Visual Studio and imported the Service Reference and called my service code from C#. It was so easy.

I then thought I'd try a web service call that would return a complex type (e.g. a Person object). This made the Web Service crash with a stack overflow.

It took me hours to find the solution. The following links helped a lot:

Basic Service - This page showed how to create a simple Web Service.

Using the Aegis Mapping - This showed me that I needed to create a mapping XML element for the Person class that ignored the 'metaClass' property of my Person object. My guess is that the stack overflow was caused by navigating a very deep or even cyclic object graph during the serialization process.

Aegis Binding - This link told me where to put the mapping XML element.

Now I can create Web Services very quickly just to try things out. And they run on any platform Groovy runs.

Have you found a better way to quickly develop Web Services? I'd love to hear about what you've found!