Stefan Arentz

I’ve created a 2.0 branch in the polarrose-wsf project where I want to try out some new ideas.

Some things on the list:

• Merge the wsf and wsf-examples into one maven project as modules (already done)
• Merge the projects on Google code
• Add the wsf-client module to the project
• Depend on Spring 2.5 for auto detection of action handlers. Just like Spring 2.5 can do with @Controller annotated Spring MVC controllers.
• Remove as many dependencies as possible (commons-*)
• Remove the need for prototype scope beans by seperating handler and parameters (work in progress)
• Write proper JavaDoc for at least all top-level code

I’ve already made a rough implementation of the seperation of Action and Parameters task. The ActionHandler interface now looks like this:

public interface WebServiceActionHandler<Account extends WebServiceAccount, Parameters>
{
   Object execute(WebServiceActionContext<Account> context, Parameters parameters)
       throws ActionHandlerException;
}

The Parameters parameter is new. So that means you need to define a bean that contains the fields to which the request parameters are mapped. For example the AddNumbersAction action from the example project now becomes:

public class AddNumbersAction implements WebServiceActionHandler<DummyWebServiceAccount, AddNumbersAction.Parameters>
{
   public Object execute(WebServiceActionContext<DummyWebServiceAccount> context, Parameters parameters)
       throws ActionHandlerException
   {
       int total = 0;
       for (Integer number : parameters.getNumbers()) {
           total += number;
       }
       return total;
   }

   public static class Parameters
   {
       private List<Integer> numbers;

       public List<Integer> getNumbers() {
           return numbers;
       }

       @WebServiceParameter
       public void setNumbers(List<Integer> numbers) {
           this.numbers = numbers;
       }
   }
}

I like to use inner classes to keep the action and parameters together but if you don’t like that then you can also do this of course:

public static class AddNumbersParameters
{
   private List<Integer> numbers;

   public List<Integer> getNumbers() {
       return numbers;
   }

   @WebServiceParameter
   public void setNumbers(List<Integer> numbers) {
       this.numbers = numbers;
   }
}

public class AddNumbersAction implements WebServiceActionHandler<DummyWebServiceAccount, AddNumbersParameters>
{
   public Object execute(WebServiceActionContext<DummyWebServiceAccount> context, AddNumbersParameters parameters)
       throws ActionHandlerException
   {
       int total = 0;
       for (Integer number : parameters.getNumbers()) {
           total += number;
       }
       return total;
   }
}

Personally I think this is a little cleaner design than what I did for the 1.x version.

The speed also went up!

• 1.2-SNAPSHOT ~ 1200 requests/second
• 2.0-SNAPSHOT ~ 2100 requests/second

This is because the prototype beans are gone of course; they don’t have to be initialized every time. I can probably get the speed up more by caching some things that are looked up every time with introspection.

Spring 2.5 has a lot of interesting new features. I really hope to make WSF 2.0 much more Spring friendly and make it possible to get a web service up and running with as less code and configuration as possible.