dilemma and doubt: XFire or Spring-WS

[dr_pompeii]

hello guys

i am reading Spring in action 2nd edition and i like it

i have a problem, in chapter 8 talk about of xfire
and chapter 9 is all about spring ws

but jesus is really cumbersome

the author said that xfire has a disadvantage about the reflection of internal API

some help about best practices or if is a suicide work with xfire , really i am lost

i appreacite

thanks in advanced

[gmatthews]

same...I really like the Spring-WS stuff right up until the part about marshalling, where it begins to look like a complete pain to use Spring-WS.

CXF (previously XFire) seems (?) to be *much* easier to handle marshalling.

I've not really used either and so I too am looking for feedback or reference to a post from someone with experience choosing between the two (or maybe other choices).

Happy to hear from the Spring team who no doubt have had this conversation when building Spring-WS.

I know the CXF REST stuff (http://cwiki.apache.org/CXF20DOC/http-binding.html) is not really 'XSD interface first' but it does look easier/simpler.

[Arjen Poutsma]

Spring-WS and XFire have different goals. The goal of XFire, IMO, is to make it easy to expose an existing Spring bean as SOAP service. It does this completely transparently, just as easy any other RemoteExporter you can find in Spring itself.

The goal of Spring-WS is to take a contract-first, message-driven approach. The fact that you are handling XML messages is much more obvious: no transparent data binding is being done for you. And believe me: sometimes you really have to have control over the XML Messages, for instance when you want to have a constant contract, or when you have to conform to a third-party contract.

So I would say that both projects have different usage scenarios.

[dr_pompeii]

Hello guys

thanks both you for your replies

gmatthews

same...I really like the Spring-WS stuff right up until the part about marshalling, where it begins to look like a complete pain to use Spring-WS.

i am agree, OXM is pain for my brain , many options for that is cumbersome and the classic advice, "each option has advantages and disadvantages"

i dont know if this is a suicide, but if spring can create its own OXM mechanism, please do it

i love spring and i know that web services is a complicated way to integrate system, but.... you are the experts

Arjen

The goal of Spring-WS is to take a contract-first, message-driven approach. The fact that you are handling XML messages is much more obvious: no transparent data binding is being done for you.

thats right

tell me, do you now a friendly tool to create xsd from xml?, spring in action 2nd edition talk about trang, maybe you or other member know other better tool

regards

[Arjen Poutsma]

i dont know if this is a suicide, but if spring can create its own OXM mechanism, please do it

Creating an OXM tool is not as simple as it might look, and I would say there is little added value in creating a new one. Nowadays, I usually recommend using JAXB2, unless you cannot/will not use annotations.

tell me, do you now a friendly tool to create xsd from xml?, spring in action 2nd edition talk about trang, maybe you or other member know other better tool

Microsoft also has a tool, which might suit you better. I haven't used it though, since I don't use Windows.

Cheers,

[dr_pompeii]

Creating an OXM tool is not as simple as it might look, and I would say there is little added value in creating a new one.

yes i know, is like talk about ORM, but the point if Spring can take the best of each tool for OXM and create a new standard/tool, it would be great

Nowadays, I usually recommend using JAXB2, unless you cannot/will not use annotations.

the obvious question for a rookie like me in this world WS,
why and which advantages has against the others options?

i dont know really much about annotions, but if i learn this to work with JAXB2 and then this save my life with OXM, i must learn it

Microsoft also has a tool, which might suit you better. I haven't used it though, since I don't use Windows.

oh Tux, our old friend microsoft, , some advice for linux OS? , maybe exist one tool out there based in Java

regards and thanks for yoru reply

[gmatthews]

OK, so I got something going over the weekend.

i dont know really much about annotions, but if i learn this to work with JAXB2 and then this save my life with OXM, i must learn it

At a simple level, all there is to JAXB 2 (if you're using Java 6, with it built in), is to annotate a target class with @XmlRootElement and optionally @XmlElement and @XmlAttribute. There you are, you are now an expert in JAXB2!

That annotated class can then act as a target for having XML unmarshalled into it.

I wasted a lot of time faffing about with namespaces and JAXB2, obviously doing something stupid -- so at the moment not using namespaces at all anywhere, but might revisit that.

The other thing I could imagine JAXB2 being useful for is marshalling a JAXB2 annotated Java object to XML, saving having to do String manipulation manually to create some XML on the client side for posting.

I'm also using Spring @Endpoint annotation and PayloadRootAnnotationMethodEndpointMapping class to detect annotated @Endpoint's, pretty much as per 5.3.3 of doco.

I'm not using MarshallingMethodEndpointAdapter, but instead an adapter contributed in this forum as an attachment by someone. That class handles empty param lists or something after I had some problem with MarshallingMethodEndpointAdapter, possibly also due to something stupid I was doing.

All in all, works well.

Next step is to see about putting a REST spin on the whole thing -- I want to publish an API sort of like the Amazon and eBay REST APIs, but not sure (?) want to inflict WS on our customers -- but not sure if that would be bastardising the use of Spring-WS too much. e.g. need to find out how I do GET, POST, PUT, DELETE if at all possible with Spring-WS.

[dr_pompeii]

thanks for the reply

At a simple level, all there is to JAXB 2 (if you're using Java 6, with it built in), is to annotate a target class with @XmlRootElement and optionally @XmlElement and @XmlAttribute. There you are, you are now an expert in JAXB2!

i used to work with jdk1.5 update 12, not 6 and even if i dont bad remember that some features of subproject of Spring not support yet version 6

if i dont bad remember annotations work too in jdk 5 right?

tell me is outthere a book or web tutorial of your preference to learn some tricks about JAXB2???

regards

[gmatthews]

tell me is outthere a book or web tutorial of your preference to learn some tricks about JAXB2???

I just did a combination of reading the Spring-WS doco, which as always is fairly extensive, and googling JAXB2.

[dr_pompeii]

thanks for the reply

it seems that this link
https://jaxb.dev.java.net/
is the source

i will read this carefully

regards