Heya, a bit late but even with 1.5.9 version this issue remains: you just can't use the "<artifactId>spring-ws</artifactId>" element as Maven start to whine that it can't resolve it. It's too bad these things are not so clearly documented, but I've managed to solve it (for me) by describing multiple artifacts.
Here's my piece from my pom with spring.version set on 1.5.9:
Code:
<!-- Spring framework -->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.ws</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-ws-core</artifactId>
<version>${spring.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.ws</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-oxm</artifactId>
<version>${spring.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.ws</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-ws-core-tiger</artifactId>
<version>${spring.version}</version>
</dependency>
I needed Spring-ws just for annotations, for which I required the spring-ws-core-tiger artifactId. So, if you require other specific libraries/artifacts and the piece above doesn't work for you, you might want to try the other artificts (you can find those in the maven repo).
Still, I don't get it why spring-ws doesn't work as there is a JAR file present in the maven repo (1.5.9-all.jar).