Poor support for static wsdl with import/included schemas
After about 8hrs solid research I am giving up on Spring-WS for now and going back to JAX-WS, due to my inability to resolve this common requirement. I worked through the tutorial and have searched high and low for answers with limited success.
I thought I would leave some feedback for project maintainers from a potential adopter. I came to this with quite a lot of experience with Spring 2.5 and SOAP Web Services in general, thinking this would be easy to come up to speed on:
- The tutorial doesn't cover the specific maven dependencies required to get up and running. This may not be an issue if using the archetype (via STS), but for someone coming in with standard eclipse, it took a frustrating hour to get the dependencies alone sorted. The Spring-WS archetype was not available by default to me. Just publish the POM dependencies, please...
- The example apps are (a) actually kind of hard to find and (b) don't use the same annotation oriented config techniques as the tutorial. So they are not a good backup to go further with and require substantial general Spring 3 knowledge.
- The tutorial gives very little time to working with static WSDL, even though this is their recommended process.
- The tutorial does not speak at all about how to expose include/imported schemas to clients, even though they recommend splitting out the types into a separate schema.
I was eventually able to expose individual schemas via HTTP with a SimpleXsdSchema, but that didn't help with their imports. And the info I read in bug reports concerning the use of a CommonsXsdSchemaCollection did not seem to work/apply.
I am left with the impression that Spring-WS is perhaps well thought out and suited to a certain type of WS development, but not mine, where we have a predefined WSDL and complex Schema we have to work with.
It also seems to suffer from a lack of support resources, judging by the number of questions going unanswered on these forums. I understand this is all free, so we can't expect too much. I guess this is the pickle we have all got ourselves into in Java land with our reliance on Open Source.
Thanks
Drew
