A few questions

[routis]

Firstly, I want to congratulate you on the spring-ws. Compared to the chaos of Axis and Axis2, I find your approach for developing contract-first web services very inspired and clean. Though, I have some questions:

I read in the presentation that spring-ws will not be another ws container, but rather a ws framework that could be intagrated with projects like Axis, XFire etc. Can you explain me that?

Additionally, are there any plans for supporting ws-security (possibly leveraging acegi)?

Finally, are there any plans for supporting ws-addressing?

Thank you in advance and excuse me for my bad command in english.

[Arjen Poutsma]

Firstly, I want to congratulate you on the spring-ws. Compared to the chaos of Axis and Axis2, I find your approach for developing contract-first web services very inspired and clean.

Thanks!

I read in the presentation that spring-ws will not be another ws container, but rather a ws framework that could be intagrated with projects like Axis, XFire etc. Can you explain me that?

What I meant with that statement, and I hope that it gets through by looking at the code, is that Spring-WS tries to be a framework with which you can build a document-driven Web Service. It's not a "SOAP Container" where you drop in your plain Java classes, and hope for the best. This does not mean that there is no value in these drop-in SOAP stacks, it just means that there are a lot of frameworks out there which already do this in a perfect way. XFire is a prime example of this: I highly recommend it for POJO Web Service development. Once JAX-WS is out, we can expect a lot more.

Now, regarding integration with Axis and XFire: I've looked into this, and while I think it is possible, it is not going to be easy. This mainly has to do with the two different Web Service models: document-driven versus remote-procedure-call like.

That said, I have some code on my hard disk which enables you to use document-driven code from both JAX-RPC and JAX-WS within Spring-WS. For instance, to use JAX-RPC (Axis 1) Handlers as EndpointInterceptors. It's not completely functional yet, but if enough people ask for it, I will make it a priority to finish and commit it.

Additionally, are there any plans for supporting ws-security (possibly leveraging acegi)?

The combination of WS-Security and Acegi is extremely interesting. We will definitely investigate this direction, though probably not before the 1.0 release. To make a 1.0 feasible within the next half year or so, we must be very careful not to create a moving target.

Finally, are there any plans for supporting ws-addressing?

What goes for WS-Security also goes for WS-Addressing: probably not for 1.0, even though it fits perfectly within the EndpointMapping/EndpointInterceptor model. The additional problem with WS-Addressing is that there is no final specification yet. There are, however, about four different versions of the spec floating around. Microsoft .NET, through its WSE toolkit, implements two of them (the March and August 2004 editions), Axis2 and XFire implement the August 2004 edition, and the February 2005 edition. And there is the August 2005 edition, which should have gone final last November, but didn't for some reason.

It's a bit of a mess, I'm afraid, and we'll have to find a nice solution so that you, as a developer, won't be cleaning it up.