Learn about the architecture or relationship between CXF, Spring, JAXWS, etc

Question

I was thrown into a CXF-based project in which the basic HowTo tutorials are easy to follow and implement but the moment there is a problem or a bug in the system, all kinds of exceptions are thrown without me understanding any of the relationship between the various components.

I know that CXF builds on top of Spring. But I have no experience with Spring and I don't know how it works.

I have also seen references to JAXWS in the cxf.xml but I don't know how it is related to either Spring or CXF.

I can build a perfectly working (simple) CXF-based web service. Contract first, using wsdl2java in a pom.xml (copycatting a sample).

But the moment I face a problem, I am stumped, relying on some tips and clues gleaned from the web.

Ideally, I would like to have a tutorial that walks me through the history of how web services evolved from Java only, to J2EE, to JAXWS, to Spring, to CXF.

But I couldn't find any.

I did find the official Apache CXF documentation but it assumes a lot of prior knowledge that is more than just knowing the Java language.

Any recommendations on how to get to a point of truly understanding what I am doing when I build a web service?

A recommended book? Online tutorial?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Yip it is a bit of a learning curve but well worth it. As far as books are concerned you can try the following.

1. Apache CXF Web Service Development
2. Spring In Action

Please be aware that J2EE and Spring are not evolutionary linked to each other Spring was more a reaction to the heavy weight J2EE specification of old. CXF is a web services toolkit/API that can be used outside of J2EE as well.

I would suggest you also join the user lists of the CXF projects and ask questions there. Also why not post some of the code causing exceptions here so we can help you with more detail?