Migrating from RPC web services to Spring Web Services

[Paul Newport]

I've been looking at migrating some autogenerated RPC web services to Spring Web Services.

At the moment the test clients for the RPC services are based on JaxRpcPortProxyFactoryBeans to create remote proxies to the underlying services that the web services wrap. There are 3rd party clients to these RPC web services that could be written in anything.

The primary reasons for migrating to Spring web services is so that endpoints can be unit tested (dependencies mocked out), and so that new services can be contract first.

My question is as follows:

If I migrate an RPC web service (that has autogenerated WSDL) to a contract first Spring Web Service, can I make the Spring Web service look identical to the original RPC version as far as then many exisitng 3rd party clients are concerned, or do RPC and Spring Web Services need fundamentally different client code (e.g. in Sring, JaxRpcPortProxyFactoryBeans versus WebServiceTemplate) ?

[tareq]

I've done something similar in the past using XSLT. Here's the link; it might be helpful:
http://www.jroller.com/0xcafebabe/en...om_rpc_encoded
As for WSDLs, you can always deploy the old generated ones in your new application.