Perhaps your colleague wants join me in the JSR-181 Web Service MetaData efford. Bill has written an annotation compiler that makes it possible to use annotations with jdk-1.4
In future there is little point to anything else but annotated source code / annotated wsdl.
See the JBossWS JIRA project for roadmap and TODOs
http://tck1.jboss.com/jira/secure/BrowseProject.jspa?id=10050
There are also some word docs in CVS