Thanks for the help over on users. I was having the following thought.
For some time now, I've been religiously using JAX-WS/JAX-B for services I build at the day job, on the theory that this gives me maximum digestibility for possible interoperation. Recently, I've been working on setting up some components where interop is not very interesting, but development efficiency is. The penny dropped; this is howcome the long-ago XFire group ended up inventing Simple/Aegis. Instead of 'yea, it will probably work if you use the same SEI on both ends,' it's 'Absolutely: use the same SEI (and beans, of course) on both sides and just don't worry about WSDL files and code generators.' OK, wonderful. Could I make this work with JMS? I suppose I should try it and see what happens, but I wonder what the experts think of the idea.
