Apache CXF 2.1 is released. I know XFire since a long time as web service provider. CXF is a merger of XFire with celtix, which provided an enterprise service bus. The main reason for choosing XFire rather then Axis was the WS-I BP compatibility. It’s a better arguing with a commercial eai provider when your webservice is at least WS-I BP 1.0 conform. CXF is JAX-WS 2.1 compatible. You can enable Pojo services with standard annotations as web services. To try that new release out i created with eclipse web tools platform a new dynamic web project with tomcat 6 as web container. First step is to add the libs needed for CXF. Normally i would download by myself the libs and copy it in to Web-inf/lib folder. Disk space is not a problem but you can’t share such projects by mail because of the size needed for the libs. So i use maven 2 to define the needed libs. The pom.xml define the project and its dependencies. Place it in the root of the project:

	4.0.0
	de.schaeftlein.dev
	cxf-sample
	war
	
	
	0.0.1-SNAPSHOT
	
	
	
		
			org.apache.cxf
			cxf-rt-core
			2.1
		
		
			org.apache.cxf
			cxf-rt-frontend-simple
			2.1
		
		
			org.apache.cxf
			cxf-rt-frontend-jaxws
			2.1
		
		
			org.apache.cxf
			cxf-rt-databinding-aegis
			2.1
		
		
			org.apache.cxf
			cxf-rt-transports-local
			2.1
		
		
			org.apache.cxf
			cxf-rt-transports-http
			2.1
		
		
			org.apache.cxf
			cxf-rt-transports-http-jetty
			2.1
		
		
			org.apache.cxf
			cxf-rt-transports-jms
			2.1
		
		
			org.apache.cxf
			cxf-rt-management
			2.1
		
		
			org.apache.cxf
			cxf-common-utilities
			2.1
		
		
			org.mortbay.jetty
			jetty
			6.1.6
		
		
			junit
			junit
			3.8.2
			test
		
		
			org.springframework
			spring
			2.0.8
		
	
	
		
			
				maven-compiler-plugin
				
					1.6
					1.6
				
			
		
		war:install
	

So the libs are defined but nothing happened in eclipse. I use the M2 Eclipse plugin. Now i enable maven with right click on the project and choose from M2 the “Enable dependency management” entry. The plugin now download the libs into the local repository for all projects. In the eclipse build path you will find now a new library called “maven dependencies”. Eclipse WTP does not deploy out of the box this library. Inside the project configuration you will find a section called “j2ee module dependencies”. Just click the check box beside the “maven dependencies” library. Now all dependent libs are deployed as well. As controller act the CXFServlet and for spring need a listener to be defined both in the web.xml:

  cxf-sample
	
		contextConfigLocation
		WEB-INF/beans.xml
	

	
		
			org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener
		
	

	
		CXFServlet
		
			org.apache.cxf.transport.servlet.CXFServlet
		
		1
	

	
		CXFServlet
		/*
	

I use spring as main configuration tool. CXF depends on spring 2.0.8. The beans.xml imports the default cxf settings and defines the HelloWorld service:

The web service has a interface:

package demo.spring;

import javax.jws.WebService;

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

and a implementation:

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;
    }
}

If not set up a local server during creation of the project you need to go to the servers tab in eclipse. Define a new server with server type “Tomcat v6.0 Server”. If the adapter does not appear click on the link to “download additional server adapters”. Under “installed runtime” should be a tomcat 6 server. If not you have to add a new runtime. For tomcat 6 i recommend at least java 1.5 as jre. In the last step you can directly add the created project for cxf. Spring and CXF use commons logging for logging. So i provide in the classpath a simple log4j.xml to output everything interesting to std out:

Setup and implementation are now done. So i started the server inside eclipse. The console should contains lines from spring configuring cxf. To see a list of deployed web services just open a browser to http://localhost:8080/cxf-sample/services, where cxf-sample is the name of your eclipse project. You should see a list of links to the generated wsdl’s of the defined services. Copy the url to the HelloWorldImplPort in the clipboard. For testing i use the free tool soapui which will be started and installed by webstart. Choose under file the point “new wsdl project”. Give it a name and paste the url from the wsdl. Leave the tack for creating sample requests and choose ok. In the tree you see the project, the service, the operations and a request for each operation. Double Click on the only request for our service. Replace the ? with a value of your own inside the arg0 tag and hit the green run button:

   
   
      
         
         
         John Doe
      
   

You should see a response like that on right side of the request in a new window:

   
      
         Hello John Doe