SpringOne 2008 - Using Spring Web Services 1.5 by Arjen Poutsma

Contract-first is considered best practice for designing a WebService:

1. create a sample xml message
2. generate the xsd based on the xml: use trang or XmlSpy
3. tweak the xsd
   

Define your Spring-WS endpoints as a POJO with @EndPoint:

• input message
• start a business service
  
• result message

Let Spring generate the WSDL-boilerplate around your existing xsd and @Endpoints. For the xml parsing/generation, you can use SAX, DOM or Trax or use a more advanced (un)marshaller with the Spring OXM module: e.g. Jaxb2 or XmlBeans.

For testing your WS, use soapUI.

Other Spring WS features are:

• pluggable interceptors: logging, optional validating,...
• client WS: WebServiceTemplate
• WS over JMS or SMTP
  
• OSGI Bundles
• WS Security (see ws.apache.org/wss4j/)
• WS-Addressing