This example will lead you through creating your first service with Spring. You'll learn how to:

Set up your build for CXF
Writing a simple JAX-WS service
Set up the HTTP transport

This example corresponds to the spring_http example in the CXF distribution.

Setting up your build

Open up your favorite IDE and create a new project. The first thing we need to do is add the necessary CXF dependencies to the project. You can find these dependencies in the CXF distribution in the lib directory.

commons-logging-1.1.jar
geronimo-activation_1.1_spec-1.0-M1.jar (or Sun's Activation jar)
geronimo-annotation_1.0_spec-1.0.jar (JSR 250)
geronimo-javamail_1.4_spec-1.0-M1.jar (or Sun's JavaMail jar)
geronimo-servlet_2.5_spec-1.1-M1.jar (or Sun's Servlet jar)
jaxb-api-2.1.jar
jaxb-impl-2.1.2.jar
jaxws-api-2.0.jar
jsr181-api-1.0-MR1.jar
saaj-api-1.3.jar
saaj-impl-1.3.jar
stax-api-1.0.1.jar
wsdl4j-1.6.1.jar
wstx-asl-3.2.0.jar
XmlSchema-1.2.jar

The Spring jars:

aopalliance-1.0.jar
spring-2.0.jar

And the CXF jars:

cxf-api-2.0-incubator-RC-SNAPSHOT.jar
cxf-common-schemas-2.0-incubator-RC-SNAPSHOT.jar
cxf-common-utilities-2.0-incubator-RC-SNAPSHOT.jar
cxf-metacode-2.0-incubator-RC-SNAPSHOT.jar
cxf-rt-bindings-soap-2.0-incubator-RC-SNAPSHOT.jar
cxf-rt-core-2.0-incubator-RC-SNAPSHOT.jar
cxf-rt-databinding-jaxb-2.0-incubator-RC-SNAPSHOT.jar
cxf-rt-frontend-jaxws-2.0-incubator-RC-SNAPSHOT.jar
cxf-rt-frontend-simple-2.0-incubator-RC-SNAPSHOT.jar
cxf-rt-transports-http-2.0-incubator-RC-SNAPSHOT.jar
cxf-tools-common-2.0-incubator-RC-SNAPSHOT.jar

Writing your Service

First we'll write our service interface. It will have one operation called "sayHello" which says "Hello" to whoever submits their name.

package demo.spring;

import javax.jws.WebService;

@WebService
public interface HelloWorld {
    String sayHi(String text);
}

Our implementation will then look like this:

package demo.spring;

import javax.jws.WebService;

@WebService(endpointInterface = "demo.spring.HelloWorld")
public class HelloWorldImpl implements HelloWorld {

    public String sayHi(String text) {
        return "Hello " + text;
    }
}

The @WebService annotation on the implementation class lets CXF know which interface we want to create our WSDL with. In this case its simply our HelloWorld interface.

Declaring your server beans

CXF contains support for "nice XML" within Spring 2.0. For the JAX-WS side of things, we have a <jaxws:endpoint> bean which sets up a server side endpoint.

Lets create a "beans.xml" file in our WEB-INF directory which declares an endpoint bean:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
	xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xmlns:jaxws="http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws"
	xsi:schemaLocation="
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd
http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws http://cxf.apache.org/schema/jaxws.xsd">

	<import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf.xml" />
	<import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-soap.xml" />
	<import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-servlet.xml" />

	<jaxws:endpoint 
	  id="helloWorld" 
	  implementor="demo.spring.HelloWorldImpl" 
	  address="http://localhost/HelloWorld" />
	  
</beans>

The bean is pretty self explanatory. The id becomes the id of the bean in the Spring context. The serviceClass property is our implementation class. Finally, the address property specifies the location which we want to host our service at. This can be either a full address with host & port or just a path.

Setting up the Servlet

We'll need to add two things to our web.xml. First, the Spring ContextLoaderLister. This starts Spring and loads our beans.xml file. We can specify where our file is via a <context-param>. The second thing is the CXF Servlet.

<web-app>
	<context-param>
		<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
		<param-value>WEB-INF/beans.xml</param-value>
	</context-param>

	<listener>
		<listener-class>
			org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener
		</listener-class>
	</listener>

	<servlet>
		<servlet-name>CXFServlet</servlet-name>
		<display-name>CXF Servlet</display-name>
		<servlet-class>
			org.apache.cxf.transport.servlet.CXFServlet
		</servlet-class>
		<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
	</servlet>

	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>CXFServlet</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

It is important to note that the address that you chose for your endpoint bean must be one your servlet listens on. For instance, if my Servlet was register for "/some-services/*" but my address was "/more-services/HelloWorld", there is no way CXF could receive a request.

Create a Client

CXF includes a JaxWsProxyFactory bean which create a client for you from your service interface. You simply need to tell it what your service class is (the HelloWorld interface in this case) and the URL of your service. You can then create a client bean via the JaxWsProxyFactory bean by calling it's create() method.

Here's an example:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
	xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xmlns:jaxws="http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws"
	xsi:schemaLocation="
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd
http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws http://cxf.apache.org/schema/jaxws.xsd">

    <bean id="client" class="demo.spring.HelloWorld" 
      factory-bean="clientFactory" factory-method="create"/>
    
	<bean id="clientFactory" class="org.apache.cxf.jaxws.JaxWsProxyFactoryBean">
	  <property name="serviceClass" value="demo.spring.HelloWorld"/>
	  <property name="address" value="http://localhost:9002/HelloWorld"/>
	</bean>
	  
</beans>

If you were going to access your client you could now simply pull it out of the Spring context (or better yet, inject it into your application using Spring!):

ApplicationContext context = ...; // your Spring ApplicationContext
HellWorld client = (HelloWorld) context.getBean("client");

Advanced Steps

For more information on using Spring you may want to read the Configuration and Spring sections of the User's Guide.