Generating client stubs from WSDL

Question

I am starting on a new project with commercial vendor. I need to write an integration module in our application to consume commercial vendor's web service. So, WSDL is not controlled by us.

I think the general approach is to do a "Contract First" development and generate stubs from the WSDL file. I would like to know what technologies are available to do this? I would really like the simplest approach that works. We use Maven 3.0.3 and Spring 3.0.5 extensively. Can I use Spring WebServiceTemplate?

Please let me know if the question isn't clear or additional details are needed.

Thanks, Tapasvi

Answer 1

You can generate the java stubs with the maven plugin for JAX-WS. Then you can use the stubs in spring to expose them as a webservice. Luckily, it's quite simple :).

Just a suggestion, don't re-generate the stubs every time you build the project, as (obviously) you won't be able to add any code to the stubs, which is sometimes very useful. I made this mistake long time ago and it was quite painful, because I had to put code in places where it didn't belong. In the last few years I used a maven profile to generate the stubs on demand and then I merged them "manually" to add the extra code. Of course, this is only viable if the WSDL doesn't change very often.

Answer 2

I have used axis and the easiest way to do is to run the utility wsdl2java and pass the location of the webservice along with the ?wdsl option.

I know lots of IDE's these days will allow to generate you stubs from within. MyeclipseIDE has an option to ingest an WSDL so does intelliJ. I think the safer approach is to use wsdl. Also if you are using jax-ws you can try

wsimport -keep -verbose location to wsdl

Answer 3

JAX-WS is included in the standard Java 6 distribution making it very simple to use.

Generate stubs with wsimport in the JDK (remember to enable as many warnings as possible, as you want to know anything that may cause problems).