Chapter 35. WSDL-First Service Implementation

If you are familiar with the syntax of WSDL and you want to have ultimate control over the layout and conventions applied to the WSDL contract, you will probably prefer to develop your Web service using the WSDL-first approach. In this approach, you start with the WSDL contract and then use the provided Apache CXF utilities to generate the requisite Java stub files from the WSDL contract.

The code presented in this chapter is taken from the following demonstration:

cxf-webinars-jboss-fuse-6.2/customer-ws-osgi-bundle

cxf-webinars-jboss-fuse-6.2/customer-ws-osgi-bundle

For details of how to download and install the demonstration code, see Chapter 33, Demonstration Code for Camel/CXF

The WSDL contract is a platform-neutral and language-neutral description of the Web service interface. In the WSDL-first approach, the WSDL contract is the starting point for implementing the Web service. You can use it to generate Java stub code, which provides the basis for implementing the Web service on the server side.

The most important piece of the generated stub code is the SEI, which is an ordinary Java interface that represents the Web service interface in the Java language.

The SEI is used in the following ways:

Figure 35.1, “Building a WSDL-First Web Service” shows an overview of the files required to implement and build the CustomerService Web service using the WSDL-first approach.

To implement and build the WSDL-first example shown in Figure 35.1, “Building a WSDL-First Web Service”, starting from scratch, you would perform the following steps: