Make your Web Services simple with Apache CXF and Spring

Have you ever just wanted to make Java Web Services so easy that you can whip one out in a few minutes, well here is your shot. Apache CXF and Spring make creating a Web Service almost stupid simple. I’ll get right to it.

First you need to configure CXF in your web application by adding a few lines to the web.xml.

CXFServlet

org.apache.cxf.transport.servlet.CXFServlet

CXFServlet
/ws/*

All this is doing is setting it up so that all requests for /ws/* to get routed to CXF. Now we need to include a new xml file for Spring to load.

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”
xmlns:context=”http://www.springframework.org/schema/context”
xmlns:cxf=”http://cxf.apache.org/core”
xmlns:jaxws=”http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws”
xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd
http://cxf.apache.org/core
http://cxf.apache.org/schemas/core.xsd
http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws
http://cxf.apache.org/schemas/jaxws.xsd”
default-autowire=”byName”>

<bean id="aegisBean"
class=”org.apache.cxf.aegis.databinding.AegisDatabinding”
scope=”prototype”>

<bean id="jaxws-and-aegis-service-factory"
class=”org.apache.cxf.jaxws.support.JaxWsServiceFactoryBean”
scope=”prototype”>

<jaxws:endpoint id="applicationWebService"
implementorClass=”com.domain.services.impl.ApplicationServiceImpl”
implementor=”#applicationService”
address=”/applicationService”>

Now, we are ready to write our service class. I typically create service classes to interact with my other backend services, databases, web services, etc. Here is an example.

@WebService(endpointInterface = “com.domain.services.IApplicationService”, name = “applicationService”, serviceName = “applicationService”, portName = “applicationPort”, targetNamespace = “http://services.domain.com/”)
@Service(name=”applicationService”)
public class ApplicationServiceImpl extends ServiceImpl implements
IApplicationService {

public String sayHello(){

return “Hello”;
}
…

And that is pretty much it. Start up your Web server and hit /ws/applicationService?wsdl and you should get a WSDL for the service automatically generated. You can use SoapUI as a testing tool to test out the services. You can also use SoapUI to generate any type of client that you want for the services, JAX-WS, JAX-RPC, Axis, you name it.

It doesn’t get much easier than that does it? I’ve only scratched the surface of CXF as well. It has many more features.

Spring and CXF make a truly versatile way to create an SOA architecture or an Enterprise Service Bus all on your own as well.