CXF includes a simple frontend which builds services from reflection. This is in contrast to the JAX-WS frontend which requires you to annotate your web service classes or create a WSDL first. The simple frontend will use reflection to intelligently map your classes to a WSDL model.

By default CXF uses the JAXB databinding. If you are interested in a databinding which does not require annotations, please see the documentation on the Aegis Databinding (2.0.x).

ServerFactoryBean

The ServerFactoryBean produces a Server instance for you. It requires a service class and an address to publish the service on. By creating a Server you'll have started your service and made it available to the outside world.

First you'll want to create your service class:

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

This does not have to be an interface, but we're going to use an interface for this example because

1. It is good to separate out your service contract (your interface) from your implementation
2. This allows us to easily create a Java Proxy client

We'll also need an implementation class:

public class HelloWorldImpl implements HelloWorld {
  public String sayHi(String text) {
    return "Hello " + text;
  }
}

And now we'll want to create a Server from this

import org.apache.cxf.frontend.ServerFactoryBean;
...

// Create our service implementation
HelloWorldImpl helloWorldImpl = new HelloWorldImpl();

// Create our Server
ServerFactoryBean svrFactory = new ServerFactoryBean();
svrFactory.setServiceClass(HelloWorld.class);
svrFactory.setAddress("http://localhost:9000/Hello");
svrFactory.setServiceBean(helloWorldImpl);
svrFactory.create();

Your service is now started! You can access the wsdl at "http://localhost:9000/Hello?wsdl".

ClientProxyFactoryBean

You'll also want to create a client for your service. CXF includes a ClientProxyFactoryBean which will create a Java proxy for you from your interface which will invoke the service.

import demo.hw.server.HelloWorld;
import org.apache.cxf.frontend.ClientProxyFactoryBean;
...

ClientProxyFactoryBean factory = new ClientProxyFactoryBean();
factory.setServiceClass(HelloWorld.class);
factory.setAddress("http://localhost:9000/Hello");
HelloWorld client = (HelloWorld) factory.create();

You simply need to set your service class and your service's URL on the bean. Calling create() will then create a proxy for you based on your interface.

Configure with Spring

The XML configuration for do-it-yourself Spring beans and cxf.xml or cxf-servlet.xml are all very similiar.
The simple front-end does not have its own extension, so you don't need any extra imports if are setting up your
own application context.

Here's an example cxf-servlet.xml with simple front end endpoint configuration. If you use your own application context, you'll need to import the soap extension and http servlet extension.

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

  <simple:server id="pojoservice" serviceClass="demo.hw.server.HelloWorld" address="/hello_world">
  	<simple:serviceBean>
  		<bean class="demo.hw.server.HelloWorldImpl" />
  	</simple:serviceBean>
  </simple:server>
</beans>

Deploying Simple FrontEnd service to a container

If you are looking to deploy the service to a container follow the steps in "Transports->HTTP Transport -> Servlet Transport" section from the Table of contents. Add the xml content from the above section "Configure cxf-servlet.xml". Name your configuration file as say services.xml. Do not name it as cxf-servlet.xml.
You need to add the import statements from the sample configuration file in "Transports->HTTP Transport -> Servlet Transport"

Well-Known Issue

There is a known issue for the JAXB data binding with POJO, please see Dan Kulp's comment in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CXF-897 . If you want to use JAXB binding you should use the JAX-WS Frontend. Mixing Simple Frontend and JAXB binding leads to problems. The article A simple JAX-WS service shows a code first JAX-WS service that is almost as easy to use as the Simple Frontend.