Tried setting up XFire with Spring and thought I'd share that experience. One more place to come for this information will not hurt ah!

Once again I used Maven to build my test application. At the bottom of this article you will find a download link for the entire application.

I have used Axis in the past and wanted to try out some other frameworks. At the same time I absolutely needed the framework to support JSR 181 (web service annotations), required the framework to integrate with Spring and relatively simple configuration. Oh also I did not want to write any WSDL. This example is an RPC based web service (unlike my previous article on document based web service with Spring-WS). I will after this article also start using Axis2, since I have been an Axis fan for many years.

JSR 181 is important to me. I think annotations are the right way to go for most simple tasks that do not require a lot of input. The web service annotations are good example about where annotations are the right fit. I have seen examples of annotations where it would be far easier and clearer to put it into the XML style configuration. Some folks are anti-annotations and I think that attitude is not the best. Use it where it makes the most sense.

Lets view the echo service java POJO code.

package com.aver; public interface EchoService {     public String printback(java.lang.String name); }

package com.aver; import java.text.SimpleDateFormat; import java.util.Calendar; import javax.jws.WebMethod; import javax.jws.WebParam; import javax.jws.WebResult; import javax.jws.WebService; @WebService(name = "EchoService", targetNamespace ="http://www.averconsulting.com/services/EchoService") public class EchoServiceImpl implements EchoService {     @WebMethod(operationName = "echo",action = "urn:echo")     @WebResult(name = "EchoResult")     public String printback(@WebParam(name ="text") String text) {         if (text== null || text.trim().length() == 0) {            return "echo: -please provide a name-";         }        SimpleDateFormat dtfmt = new SimpleDateFormat("MM-dd-yyyy hh:mm:ss a");         return "echo: '" + text + "' received on " +dtfmt.format(Calendar.getInstance().getTime());     } }

As you can see above I have made liberal use of JSR 181 web service annotations.

• @WebService declares the class as exposing a web service method(s).
• @WebMethod declares the particular method as being exposed as a web service operartion.
• @WebParam gives easy-to-read parameter names which will show up in the auto-generated WSDL. Always provide these for the sake of your consumers sanity.
• Also you can see that the java method is named 'printback' but exposed as name 'echo' by the @WebMethod annotation.

Here is the web.xml.

<?xmlversion="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!DOCTYPE web-app     PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTDWeb Application 2.3//EN"    "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd"> <web-app>     <context-param>        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>        <param-value>           classpath:org/codehaus/xfire/spring/xfire.xml           /WEB-INF/xfire-servlet.xml        </param-value>     </context-param>     <listener>        <listener-class>           org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener        </listener-class>     </listener>     <servlet>        <servlet-name>XFireServlet</servlet-name>        <servlet-class>           org.codehaus.xfire.spring.XFireSpringServlet        </servlet-class>     </servlet>     <servlet-mapping>        <servlet-name>XFireServlet</servlet-name>        <url-pattern>/servlet/XFireServlet/*</url-pattern>     </servlet-mapping>     <servlet-mapping>        <servlet-name>XFireServlet</servlet-name>        <url-pattern>/services/*</url-pattern>     </servlet-mapping> </web-app>

The web.xml configures the 'XFireSpringServlet' and sets up the Spring listener. Straightforward.

Finally here is the xfire-servlet.xml (this is our spring configurationfile).
 

<?xmlversion="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans ">www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd">     <bean id="webAnnotations"        class="org.codehaus.xfire.annotations.jsr181.Jsr181WebAnnotations"/>     <bean id="jsr181HandlerMapping"xfire_echo.jar        class="org.codehaus.xfire.spring.remoting.Jsr181HandlerMapping">        <property name="typeMappingRegistry">            <refbean="xfire.typeMappingRegistry" />        </property>        <property name="xfire" ref="xfire" />        <property name="webAnnotations" ref="webAnnotations" />     </bean>     <bean id="echo"class="com.aver.EchoServiceImpl" /> </beans>

• Sets up the xfire bean to recognize jsr 181 annotations.
• Last bean is our echo service implementation bean (withannotations).

That is it. Build and deploy this and you should see the WSDL at http://localhost:9090/echoservice/services/EchoServiceImpl?wsdl.

Click here to download the Maven based project code. To build run:

• mvn package
• mvn jetty:run