What is Spring Web Services?
Spring Web Services is a product of the Spring community
focused on creating document-driven Web services. Spring Web Services aims to facilitate contract-first
SOAP service development, allowing for the creation of flexible web services using one of the many ways
to manipulate XML payloads.
Key Features
- Makes the Best Practice an Easy Practice: Spring Web Services makes enforcing best practices
easier. This includes practices such as the WS-I basic profile, Contract-First development, and having
a loose coupling between contract and implementation.
- Powerful mappings: You can distribute incoming XML request to any object, depending on message
payload, SOAP Action header, or an XPath expression.
- XML API support: Incoming XML messages can be handled in standard JAXP APIs such as DOM, SAX,
and StAX, but also JDOM, dom4j, XOM, or even marshalling technologies.
- Flexible XML Marshalling: The Object/XML Mapping module in the Spring Web Services distribution
supports JAXB 1 and 2, Castor, XMLBeans, JiBX, and XStream. And because it is a separate module,
you can use it in non-Web services code as well.
- Reuses your Spring expertise: Spring-WS uses Spring application contexts for all configuration,
which should help Spring developers get up-to-speed nice and quickly. Also, the architecture of
Spring-WS resembles that of Spring-MVC.
- Supports WS-Security: WS-Security allows you to sign SOAP messages, encrypt and decrypt them,
or authenticate against them.
- Integrates with Acegi Security: The WS-Security implementation of Spring Web Services provides
integration with Spring Security.
This means you can use your existing configuration for your SOAP service as well.
- Built by Maven: This assists you in effectively reusing the Spring Web Services artifacts
in your own Maven-based projects.
- Apache license. You can confidently use Spring-WS in your project.
