Stefan Arentz

Spring 2.5 has some great improvements that make configuration much simpler. One that I very much like is the auto detection of components in the classpath. The Spring 2.5 documentation on this subject is worth reading. It also gives a nice and simple example.

For the 2.0 branch of the Polar Rose Web Service Foundation I have added an AnnotationWebServiceController that uses this new Spring 2.5 functionality.

This makes creating a web service very very simple. All you have to do to get going with a public web service is annotate your Actions with @WebServiceAction and tell Spring to scan for component.

This is an example action:

package com.foo.action.
@WebServiceAction(name = "Hello", version = "2008-04-01")
public class HelloAction implements WebServiceActionHandler
{
    public Object execute(WebServiceActionContext context, Parameters parameters)
        throws ActionHandlerException
    {
        return “Hello, ” + parameters.getName();
    }

    public static class Parameters
    {
        private String name;

        public String getName() {
            return name;
        }

        @WebServiceParameter
        public void setName(String name) {
            this.name = name;
        }
    }
}

The following Spring configuration is enough to setup the web service controller:

<beans ...>
  <context:component-scan base-package="com.foo.action"/>
  <bean id="annotationWebServiceController" class="com.polarrose.wsf.controller.AnnotationWebServiceController">
    <property name="version" value="2008-04-01"/>
  </bean>
</beans>

I think this is a really nice way to auto-detect and configure ‘top level’ components. It removes a lot of XML configuration. Which I don’t mind, but less is always better.

If you want to play with the framework, you can check it out from Google Code.