Spring-WS 0.9.1 released

[Arjen Poutsma]

Dear Spring community,

I'm pleased to announce that Spring Web Services 0.9.1 has been released. This is a maintenance release, fixing a number of issues found in previous the 0.9 release. Download it here.

For a full list of enhancements and fixes, please see the changelog.

Now that this release is out the door, we will focus on providing new features. The overall road map can be seen in the Spring-WS JIRA.

Cheers,

Arjen

[Gori]

Arjen,

Spring-WS looks great. I'm a big XmlBeans fan and I actually want to use it everywhere when I'm working with xml.
When doing web services I always found the current implementations of the serializers (of JBoss/WebSphere) did not cover all xml possibilities as XmlBeans does. Also the validation was weak because it did not validate against the created xsd's.

I also started to create some way of working with XmlBeans when doing webservices but quited because of lack of inspiration and time :-(

Do you guys need any help? For instance working out examples or stuff?

[Arjen Poutsma]

Spring-WS looks great.

Thanks!

I'm a big XmlBeans fan and I actually want to use it everywhere when I'm working with xml.
When doing web services I always found the current implementations of the serializers (of JBoss/WebSphere) did not cover all xml possibilities as XmlBeans does. Also the validation was weak because it did not validate against the created xsd's.

Validation is indeed important, and if you're using an Object/XML mapping technique you are pretty sure that you end up with valid XML. The only disadvantage of validating (when using OXM or not) is that it goes against the principle be lenient in what you accept, and strict in what you send: you really expect the client to send the data exactly as you expect it, nothing more, nothing less.

A more lenient way to handle the incoming message is to capture certain aspects of it, by using something like XPath queries. The idea is that you extract certain pieces of the message, and use that information to perform your business logic. This also allows for a much smoother upgrade path for your Web service. While creating a return message, you could use validation (and OXM), because the response should conform to the schema.
While developing, you can check the validity of the response with the PayloadValidatingInterceptor (enable the validateResponse property). Since validation is expensive, you can disable validation when going live.

Look for this sort of functionality in release 1.0-M1, or track the issue here. I will probably also blog about it soon, since I think that this sort of databinding is really important.

Do you guys need any help? For instance working out examples or stuff?

Well, I guess we can always do with another example! :-)

Another way to help would be to give me feedback: by starting a thread here in the forum or by writing something about Spring-WS on your blog (if you have one). Though I think that most of the publicity should come when we release 1.0, I would hurt to write a little blog entry about what you like and possibly dislike about Spring-WS.

Cheers,